


More Than Once Is A Vice

by WonderWench



Series: Its a Virtue [2]
Category: Hellblazer, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angels, Demons, Dreams, F/M, I'm Bad At Tagging, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Magic, Moral Dilemmas, References to Depression, Voodoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26085199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WonderWench/pseuds/WonderWench
Summary: *COMPLETE*SECOND DRAFT SEP 2020Epilogue/ Part Two of 'Its a Virtue.'Temperance - the Queen of Hell, the punk, the cellist who kills things - is sick to death of the world. God squeezed her into his grand plan, but she's not convinced that its working.While the Winchesters adjust to having their father back she spends time looking around her, and trying to understand where it all went wrong.'I reckon I could do it.''Do what?' Sam scowled, stabbing his food with his fork.'Kill god.' The pasta was nice, the silky sauce that covered it was rich with garlic and tomato. She licked her lips, eyeing the bowl and considering seconds................
Relationships: Crowley (Supernatural)/Original Female Character(s), Dean Winchester/Original Female Character(s), John Constantine/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Its a Virtue [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1893853
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'I've killed a lot of people, recently, myself included.'  
> 'I prayed for you to find balance, child, acceptance in yourself. It pains me to hear my prayers were unheard, yet I am glad that you have grown.' he put a hand out to her cheek. 'You can do this thing, you can rule all of Hell, you have the strength of mind and body.'  
> 'I don't want to.' she said, simply. 'And don't give me any bull about those not seeking power being best suited to it, thats bollox and we both know it.'  
> He smiled, a wide white smile in the fire light. 'You want to give it to me?.....

They landed with a crash outside the Hellmouth. Dean looked around, in disbelieve, he didn't get to say goodbye.  
'Dad?' Sam was bent over the prone figure, which began to stir from its sleep.  
Dark eyes flickered open, slipped over Sam's face, over Deans, then he fell back into his slumber.  
'Lets get him in the car and call Cas.' Dean said, trying to push away his anger and focus on his dad, who he hadn't seen in years, who should be dead but wasn't  
The Angel appeared the moment they put their hands together. He went down on one knee, touched John's head and said 'He's stable, just in shock, his soul has been through a lot of trauma.'  
'Stable, what does stable mean, stable how?' Sam pressed.  
Instead of answering Castiel transported them all back to the Bunker and carried John to a spare bedroom.  
'Whats wrong with him?' Dean asked. He was very aware of a heavy ache leaking in his chest, it was bittersweet to finally have his father back, at the cost of another member of his family.  
'His soul is ill. It was mutilated by the Cage, Lucifer has healed it in a rudimentary fashion, but it requires assistance. I must examine his mind for breaks.'  
'Breaks!' Sam's voice rose a few octaves.  
The Angel bent over the body and went still, they stayed like that for hours, Sam dosed in a seat by the bed, and Dean went to work. He needed to get Temperance out of Hell.  
Castiel came out of his trance with a sigh as the sun was coming up.  
'He will sleep for several more days, I have made it so that his memories are warded off, they will only return when he is strong enough, and even then it will be gradual. I will need more sessions with him.'  
'Thank you.' Dean breathed. He leaned forward and crushed the Angel in a quick hug, slapping him on the back. He glanced down at the bed, then over to Sam who's wide eyes were transfixed on their dads face.  
'Its him.' Sam said.  
The body on-top of the sheets was their dad, he hadn't aged a day from when they had last seen him. It was John Winchester.  
His beard was turing around his chin grey but his hair was still, mostly, brown, a few crags and lines in his skin that were all familiar to Dean. Not just from his memories, he saw those lines on his own face when he looked in the mirror each morning. It was like John had been frozen in time. He didn't look like a man heading towards his mid 60s.   
Castiel explained how this body had been crafted, it wasn't the flesh that John Winchester had been born in, but it was close enough.  
'I would hazard a guess that he used a Reapers powers to reanimate a fragment of your fathers remains and grow this new vessel.'  
'Creepy.' Dean said, resisting the urge to poke him.  
'Do you think she did it?' Sam asked, suddenly, flicking his dark, dark, eyes to his brother.  
'Yeah, Sammy, she did it.'  
Temperance had to have done it, she had to have Caged Lucifer, otherwise what was the point in fixing their Dad, what was the point of all the heartache. She had done what she set out to do, and now they needed to go get her.  
Castiel left, promising to return in a few days time and Dean led his brother to the kitchen, to make coffee. Neither of them would be sleeping much any time soon.   
'You ok Sam?” his brother looked almost afraid, there was a stark sort of deer-in-the-headlights quality about how he moved.  
'No.' Sam muttered, hand up to his mouth. 'Dean, what if he's mad at us, for doing this? What if he's disappointed and we've done the wrong thing?'  
'We saved him from Hell, Sam, I don't think he'll mind.'  
'But' Sam broke off, looking away. Dean saw his fear then and set his jaw. Sam had never forgiven himself for opening the Cage, for being a vessel for Lucifer. None of it was his fault, they knew all about destiny now, Dean knew how pointless it was for Sam to blame himself for this, but he was doing just that.  
When they had lost their Dad it was all Dean could do to stop himself breaking apart. He loved his father, he hero worshiped him for years, he became a Hunter for him, Christ, he dressed the same, listened to the same music, drove the same damn car. His dad was more than a dad, he was his general, his teacher, his parter and his friend, loosing him had torn a hole through him that had never really healed.   
The years they had spent without him had let him really see the bad parts of his dads nature, he had come to terms with it, let it go, all that was left now was good thoughts. Eating Winchester casserole, learning to drive, watching football. All that good stuff, his thoughts about John only went sour when Dean was in a bad place. He was in a bad place now.  
'Sam, Dad was never disappointed in you, never. It was always me, I wasn't smart enough, I wasn't good enough, I didn't protect you when you needed me, I messed up, I didn't follow orders. Its me, I'm the disappointment, I'm the bad son. When he wakes up he's not going to hate you for almost opening the Cage that time, he's gonna be proud because you survived, you survived and you fixed it.'  
'He didn't think you were a disappointment.' Sam shook his head, dashing away Dean's reassurances, suddenly looking disgusted. 'He loved you, he treated you harshly sometimes, because you were the oldest. He didn't know how to exist after Mom died, he tired, he kept us safe and taught you to keep me safe. Dad never thought you were a disappointment, Dean, he loved you. He loved us!'  
Dean gave him a wry smile, shrugging. 'Sure, maybe, what I'm saying is Sam, don't worry. Its going to be ok.'  
'Is it?” Sam asked, his mouth turning down at the corners. 'Are we gonna be ok, after all this.'  
'We have to be.' Dean was sure of this, they had to make this work, he would make this work. He'd get his dad back on his feet and he could be there for Sam, while Dean tried to figure out how to safe Temperance. He would do anything and everything for his family, he didn't care what it cost, she wasn't getting trapped down there. Fuck God, fuck destiny.   
'Dean whats normal now? I mean, we defeated Michael and Lucifer, the Earth is safe from them. What next?'  
'I don't know, Sam. I don't. When I picture myself happy, she's here too. I'm not sure how we move forward, but we will. We will.'  
Days trickled by as slow as treacle, minutes lasting hours as they kicked their heels against their Dad's door and tried not to notice how quiet the place had become.  
When Sam wasn't watching, Dean researched, and researched, and drank when it all looked like it was going nowhere, then he got back up and started planning again.   
Dean found his feet walking down the hall towards Temperance's music room.  
She had stencilled a 'Keep Out' sign in black marker and tapped it to the door, but she never seemed to mind anyone being in there. There were records and cd's strewn on the floor. A music stand with a bundle of notes was gathering dust near the wall. He sat down, crossing his legs, and began sorting through the records. He didn't know half of this shit, there was a misshapen orange thing that didn't seem to fit any of the sleeves, so he dropped it onto the record player to find out what it was.  
'What the hell?' he bent his head to the player.  
'The milky way she walks around  
All feet firmly off the ground  
Two worlds collide, two worlds collide'  
Poetry, beat poetry, like bad rap performed by a thick English accent. He looked down at the pile of sleeves and found one, he thought it was ripped up, but it wasn't, and the triangle of music fit into it neatly.  
'Oh my God, Tem.' he said, shaking his head at the offerings. There was the to be expected Joy Division, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Misfits, Rancid and dozens of bands that he had never heard of before, but among the music were the Scooby Doo soundtrack, old Pop hits and a lot of classical stuff. He laughed aloud when Abba slipped out from Blondie's sleeve.  
It was too quiet without her, he couldn't remember what it had been like with just him and Sam. He was carefully replacing all the music onto the boxy shelves that Temperance had stored her records on, when Sam shouted for him.  
'Dean!'  
He was awake.  
His dad was awake.

Castiel was bent over John's body, his hands on either side of the mans head. 'I must help him return to his memories gently, his soul still needs time to heal.'  
'I'm ok, I'm alright.' John said, he gently brushed the Angels hands away. 'What are you, a Witch?'  
'I am an Angel of the Lord.' Castiel said, taking a step back.  
'A, what?'  
'Dad!' Dean went to his fathers bedside.  
'Hey, son.' he smiled, tiredly.   
'We've been so worried.'  
'Let me tell you, I've had better vacations. I don't remember much yet but, well, it wasn't a goddamn picnic.'  
He got to his feet without his children's help and took a deep breath looking at them, drinking them in. 'So, you didn't go back to Stanford?'  
'No sir, I found something I like doing better.' Sam was smiling, it took years off him, years Dean didn't know that Sam had been carrying.   
'I'm glad you two stuck together.' John's hand drifted to Sam, feeling his arm, squeezing his shoulder. 'You're big brother been taking care of you?'  
'Yes sir.' Sam nodded, he looked at Dean, gave him a half smile.   
'What is this place?”  
'Its the Men of Letter's HQ, we found it a while ago, with a little help from Grandad Winchester.'  
'No shit?' John looked up and all about him. 'You guys speaking to the dead these days?'  
'Time-travel.' they boys both answered, strangely, Dean noted, they had put on Temperance's usual deadpan tone to say it. They broke into identical smiles and laughed.  
'Seem's like I missed quite a bit.' John spoke kindly.  
'Come on, I'll give you the tour.' Dean offered.  
It was odd to feel his spine straightening, his body falling back into that ready posture his dad had drilled into him, he deferred to the man, let him out the door in front of him, kept almost half a step back.  
'This place, its.' John made a whooshing noise.  
'I know right, we have a dungeon!'  
Dean was leading him to a room. There was only one other on the hall that he, Sam and Temperance had shared. He saw John frown at her door, as if he knew.  
'There was a girl.' he began.  
'Tem, yeah, she went into your head to make sure Lucifer wasn't conning us.'  
'Where is she now?' he cocked his head, frowning. 'She was cute.'  
'Dad!  
'What?'  
'She's, um, she's in Hell.' haltingly, hating himself with each word, he told his dad everything. He couldn't stop, the plug had been pulled and it all just came roaring out of him.  
'She's there because of us, because of me. I couldn't stop her and now I can't save her. The past few years, shit, since you were gone its been hell. We've had everything thrown at us, Demonic, Angelic, Supernatural or otherwise. We got caught in a storm and I still don't know if its over yet. I'm running on fumes. I need here, dad, I need you to look at me and see me. I will keep swinging till I got nothing left, cause thats all I am. Its what you raised me up to be. I'm not ok dad, I'm not. I need help.'  
John's face had cascaded from worried to disgusted, to shocked and back again. The colour had drained out of him. He put his strong hands on his eldest sons shoulders and crushed him to his chest.  
'Dean, oh God, son, I'm so sorry.'  
'Its ok.' It wasn't but Dean shrugged it off, he couldn't hold onto this anymore. He had hit rock bottom before and he was scrapping along inches from it now, Temperance had been the one to pull him up that far, he needed to do the rest on his own.  
John released him, but kept his hands on Dean's shoulders.  
'I guess I thought you'd find yourself a normal life somehow, but I never set you up for it. I didn't treat you right or show you how to be stable. I acted like you were a machine for me to use, not my son. I ordered you instead of asking you, I kept you at a distance instead of telling you everyday how proud I was of you, and how much I love you. I wish I could tell you I had good reasons for being such a piece of shit, but I don't, I don't Dean. You shouldn't have brought me back, I don't deserve your forgiveness.'  
'Dad.' he paused, he couldn't lie to his father, he couldn't keep lying to himself. 'We had to bring you back, because thats what we do, we save people. You're our Dad, we don't have to like each other, we love each other. I'm glad we got you back, ok, we get to try again. I need you, Sam needs you.'  
He wondered what Sam would say, he wondered what Sam was thinking. Dean had spent his whole life trying to take care of Sam and Sam had tried to take care of him. They needed their dad to be a real dad right now, because they had been to Hell and back and Dean wasn't sure if he would ever be ok again.

'Sammy?'  
His giant of a brother was leaning over a notebook, his hands hovering about the keys of his laptop.   
'Hey.'  
'What're you up to?'  
'I'm, well, I'm still writing the book of all our case notes. Like as a Guide of all the stuff we've been up against. I've been updating this library for a while and it hit me that, well, I could add to it.'  
'No shit? Thats awesome.'  
'Yeah?” he looked a little shy and shuffled his papers around a bit. 'So, Dad get settled?'  
'Yeah he's hit the showers. Listen, theres something I need to talk to you about.'  
Sam looked up, closing his laptop and pushing it aside.   
'I'm not ok, Sam.'  
Sam's kind face crumpled, Dean felt a pang of remorse but continued.  
'I'm not ok and I need to know we've tried everything, everything, to save Tem. Everything.'  
'Dean, we have.' Sam pressed. 'There isn't anything else we can do. We don't even know if, if she's.'  
'She's alive.' Dean growled sharply.  
'We can't get her out of being the Queen of Hell, I want to, be we can't.'  
Dean frowned down at his boots, they were getting scuffed, the cuff of his pants leg was a little frayed, he needed new ones. Crowley had left Temperance a lot of money and she had pawned it all off on him and Sam. He never thought he'd want to talk to that bastard again, but he did, he wanted to ask his advice, he wanted the sly Demon back, because he would know what to do.   
Crowley never gave up on Temperance, her love or her capacity to make things right. He'd probably tell Dean to leave it be, that she'd sort herself out, that she didn't need to be rescued.  
'Dean?' Sam asked, breaking the silence.  
'Sometimes I feel like giving up, but I don't, even when its hurts like hell. Its not in my blood. Its not in our blood.' he said, locking eyes with his brother.   
'What do we do?'  
'The letter Crowley wrote us, about Papa Midnite. We need to contact him.' he stabbed a finger down on the desk, then stood up, examining the shelves.  
'Dean, I don't know.'  
'Well, I do Sam.' he opened a leather-bound book on Voodoo and flipped to the section on summonings. He was disgusted to find much of it was written in illegible French handwriting.  
Sam watched him, a creased frown on his face then he sighed 'We need a black hen or a rooster and an icon.'  
'Yeah?” Dean cracked a little grin. 'We doing this?'  
'Fuck yeah, we're getting her back.'  
'So whats the plan? Dean asked, ready to do anything.  
'Don't die?'

She had managed to cultivate a regal air, one that easily commanded attention. It was a little bit of her mother, a bit of her father and more than a drop of Crowley. Already she looked like a Queen.  
The emerald pendant hanging from a thin gold chain was the only splash of colour she would allow. She wore black, not neat or tailored, but ragged and over-washed to a dark grey, her jeans were torn, her laces frayed, the collar of her shirt wilted for want of starch and the fishnet vest bellow had the look of limp string. Above that, her face was pale, her dark eyes heavy with black makeup and her shadowy hair fell in disarray to her shoulders.  
'Fuck off.' she said, lightly, without venom to the Demon who approached her throne.  
For all the regal air, she did find stabbing them got things done just as quickly.  
'My Lady, there is the matter of the contracts.' He was the King of the Crossroads, a job that had once been Crowley's.  
'What about them?'   
'Lucifer rather disliked the previous system and the one he implemented is.' the creature trailed off, looking afraid.  
'Who made the last system?'  
'Crowley.' he said shortly, almost a snarl.  
'Well, go fucking back to that then, show some fucking initiative.'  
'You have recalled all the Demons to Hell, My Liege, they cannot do their duties.' his head bowed, his voice desperate.   
'And once you get your shit together I'll consider letting you out to play.' she stood up, he fell to his knees, she hated to admit that she sort of liked that.   
Every-time she approached the Hellmouth she found herself back int the Throne room, she hadn't worked up the courage to zap back to the world, she was too afraid of what would happen in her absence, to afraid that she would be stuck in this place.   
Temperance had yet to close the Gates, if truth be told a part of herself, that she didn't much like, was still waiting for a rescue, and another part of her would wait until Heaven closed theirs first. Earth needed balance, she was very much an all or nothing type of person.  
The Throne room had awful acoustics so she had set up a drum kit and cello in an ante chamber and tried to practice a little of each everyday. It had been by chance that she noticed the room, the door slightly ajar and clogged with rubble from her Cage building. She was sure she had never been in it before and was overjoyed to have found a fantastic portrait of Crowley in there, wearing a uniform emblazoned with a pitchfork. Settling herself down she began to play a riff by Apocalyptica when there was a commotion at the door.

A large, tall and broad, black man in a yellow suit was approaching her. He bowed with a flourish, sweeping off his top hat and throwing out his bone topped cane.  
'Hi, Papa.'  
He looked young, he looked handsome, a far cry from the thin and waining Priest she had known.   
'Apprentice, you have been enthroned for some time and have not yet come to visit. You make an old man heave his weary bones to come to you.'  
She stood up and they kissed swiftly on both cheeks, much to the chagrin of the watching Demons. Papa Midnite wasn't a Demon, he was a Damned Soul, a step above the ordinary dead but not a true creature of Hell. He strutted through her domain like he owned the place.  
'How's death?'  
'Death had been good to me, I have spent time with my sister, she is working under a Demon of Vengeance and climbing quite high in the ranks.'  
'I'm glad to hear it.' Papa had sent his sister to Hell to be his eyes and ears beneath the earth, centuries ago. She had suffered and she had changed, becoming a Demon to most, but to the her brothers followers she was a Spirit Guide. Temperance had felt conflicted when she heard about it, but it was all so long ago now, and she seemed content.  
'I heard that our rascally old Constantine passed. I was distraught to be unable to offer you comfort, dear one.'  
She shrugged 'I'm sure he's bored stupid in Heaven.'  
'And, your more recent lover, that foul Demon in fine suits, he has gone too, has he not?'  
'Yeah.'  
'He loved you dearly, child, I could see that. It was not a lie. With all your power now, shall you not bring him back?'  
'I can't' she said, badly, twisting her boot toe into the stone beneath her.   
'You wont?' he asked, gently, taking her hand in his silk gloved one.  
She led him to the Throne room. She hadn't changed much about it, it was lacking in style and she saw him wince at this. Give him the chance and he'd have it done up with skulls and black candles and plump virgins. She motioned him to sit with her on the dais, summoning rum and ginger with a click of her fingers she poured him a tall glass.  
'I'm not god, my power is limited, but even if I could I might not.'  
'Why?'  
'Because it would invalidate a good death, because he'd become my rival, because I'd maim and murder to have him in my arms again. I need him so much and I want him, badly, but he's dead. He's gone.'  
She spent time trying not to miss him, she spent time saying goodbye and forgiving him, she missed Crowley and she wasn't going to fuck around with death and bring him back.  
The doors banged open and a harassed looking demon in a denim jacket and tattooed face hurried towards them  
'My lord, I beg that you let us return to the Earth! We have duties to do!' he fell to his knees, eyes on Papa before he squeezed them shut in supplication. He had a high, reedy voice, that echoed off the stone.  
Papa gave her a sly look and rose to his feet in a smooth movement.  
'Who am I, Demon?'  
'The new King of Hell, the Abomination.' he wet his lips, risking a glance up again.   
'The Abomination?' he said lightly, tapping his cane on the creatures bent neck.  
Temperance rolled her eyes at his theatrics, head resting on her fist. He was a showman, first and foremost, if they hadn't been so similar she was sure he and John would have gotten along.  
'Demon.' Papa crooned. 'I agree you should be at your work, but perhaps it is the Queen you should be asking?'  
The young Demon gaped up at Papa Midnite, the his eyes rolled in disgust to Temperance who waved from the wrist, ankle over leg on the floor.  
'Its ok, you didn't know.' she waved him up. He rose on shaking legs. 'However, chain of command and all that, you should have asked your boss and then your boss could have come to me.'  
'I will punish him, most thoroughly' the Crossroad King snarled, having hurried in on his heels.  
'Your call.' she said, taking Papa's arm and sitting him back down.  
He chuckled happily to himself, dusting off his top hat.  
'Child, I must admit I have reason to visit beyond exchanging pleasantries with an old friend.'  
'Go on.' she nodded to him, pouring more rum, she assumed as much.  
'I know you do not believe in absolute monarchy or dictatorship, I await you to announce plans to build a ruling council here and come to offer my name to represent the Damned.'  
'I had thought about it.' she admitted, stretching out her legs in front of her. She looked within herself, seeing things she didn't want to see. She stood up and wandered the length of the room, thinking.  
'You are much changed.' he said, at length.  
'Yeah?'  
'Where is my scowling girl with her unkempt hair and hollow eyes? This young woman cannot be her, this woman with her straight spine and certainty!' he spun her around, taking her by the elbows to look at her. There was a fatherly type of pride in his eyes, she smiled back at him.  
'I've killed a lot pf people, recently, myself included.'  
'I prayed for you to find balance, child, acceptance in yourself. It pains me to hear my prayers were unheard, yet I am glad that you have grown.' he put a hand out to her cheek. 'You can do this thing, you can rule all of Hell, you have the strength of mind and body.'  
'I don't want to.' she said, simply. 'And don't give me any bull about those not seeking power being best suited to it, thats bollox and we both know it.'  
He smiled, a wide white smile in the halogen light. 'You want to give it to me?'  
'You're a Damned Soul, you're not here because you made a deal or killed a baby or anything. You're here because you think you should be, because you want to be.'  
He nodded, waving his hand for her to continue.  
'If I gave you Hell you would make it work, you would get rid of this Christian hangover and start making these cunts redeem themselves. You'd know how.'  
'I would, and I have thought about it.'  
'But?' she narrowed her eyes.  
'But my Hell would not remain aloof from the mortal realm, sweet apprentice. My Demons would be free to walk among mankind, and you do not want this.'  
'Do I not?'  
He looked at her, long and hard. 'I was approached by two hunters.'  
She dropped her head, groaning. 'Let me guess?'  
'Winchesters.' he gave a nod, putting his palm to her head, cradling her skull under his long fingers. 'They asked me to close the Gates.'  
'Of course they did.' she began, bitterly. 'They thought about calling you before I came down here.'  
'After I had taken over, from you and sent you back to Earth.' he continued, smoothly.  
Her head snapped up, Papa was smiling. 'What?'  
'I believe the words 'family' and 'screw destiny' were bandied about.' he sniffed 'They used an inferior sort of black hen, the connection was poor.'  
She broke into a slow, disbelieving smile. 'Those bastards.'  
'They, very much, want you back. They say you do not want Hell closed, not while Heaven remains open.'  
'Yeah, thats it in a nutshell.'  
He shot his cuffs, tapping his fingertips together and leaning forward. 'Child, let us old friends come to an arrangement. 'Theres a place in Hell for everyone, for you, it is the Throne. You cannot stop being Queen of Hell, but you can pass the Throne to me and I will hold it.'  
'Really?'  
'Yes, I shall, however, I shall not close the Gates. Not until you tell me too.' he put a finger to her chin. 'You have grown much, you will grown more. Go to your humans and spill wicked blood, live, little one. Live well.'


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...I'm the better off alone type, but they're they only people left in the world for me. I need to be around them, to make sure they're safe. One day I'll leave, because thats me, I'm fucking eternal and can't be held the fuck down, but until then, I'm here, for them.....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

Hell was a dark echo of Heaven, it was strange but she could almost see those gleaming halls if she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the Angels walking around her. She was installing Papa Midnite as her Regent, which was easier said than done, when she felt something shift.   
It was like when she had removed the Mark of Cain, around her Hell had tilted off axis and settled back differently. 'Hmm.' she looked around, expecting to see some change.  
She went outside, to the plains and looked up at the sky, nothing was different, nothing was the same though. She couldn't put her finger on it, and, curious to find a problem, she went to the Dead Centre.   
The new Cage was there, unapproachable to all Demon and Angel kind, except her. It was a bundle of raw reality, as it had been when she had crafted it. It hadn't been opened, or attacked. It hadn't caused that tilt.   
'You feel that?' She found Papa, sorting through colourful suits in her room, his room, the room.   
His eyes drifted over the fabrics, brushing off dust and lint 'Feel what?'  
'A sort of glitch in the matrix, type of feeling.'  
'Apprentice I have told you before about popular culture references.'  
'Yeah, yeah.' she turned around 'They don't imbue you with an air of gravitas that all Voodoo practitioners need to embody. I remember.'  
She heard him chuckle behind her. He hadn't felt it, she had. She couldn't second guess herself on this, it wasn't as if someone had left a procedural manual on running Hell. She called the Kings to her, one by one,but none of them had anything unusual to report.  
'Fuck it.' she took out her phone and dialled a number. 

She needed a ride out of Hell, luckily she knew a guy, and she had a feeling he had been waiting for her call. He arrived, promptly, his neat suit and shoes out of place in Hell's dereliction.  
Across the Throne room, the King of Heaven and the Queen of Hell smiled at each other, with warm familiarity. She nodded her chin at him and he dropped his head, in a bow.  
'Hi, Cas.'  
'I am glad, beyond all reason, to see you alive and well. The thought of your death was painful to me.'  
'Nice to see you too.'  
He crossed the floor very quickly and embraced her, holding her firmly in place while she squirmed. 'Sister I rejoice.'  
She pushed him away, rolling her shoulders 'Sister? Think I am definitely among the fallen now.'  
'No. You are not. You have called for me to raise you from the fires of Hell and return you home. Are you ready to leave?'  
'Yeah.' she agreed, she had been ready to leave since she got there. Hell just wasn't for her, it was dank, miserable place full of evil little shits. She shrugged into her coat, taking Castiel's offered arm.  
He brought her to Earth, to a busy town in Romania, he led her down a cobbled street, under the eaves of a quaint little hotel and they sat by the window and ordered coffee.  
'You defeated Lucifer?'  
'Got a Cage up, stuck him in it.' she agreed.  
'The brothers have missed you, very much, as have I. They have returned to the Bunker with their father, John.'  
'How is he?'  
'His memories are dangerous, but he is healing well. It has been several months on Earth.'  
She looked out at the bright spring sunshine and nodded. 'Time is weird down there.'  
Hell moved at a different speed, sometimes much faster, sometimes much slower. It had felt like years for her, since she had been home.  
'Yes.' he looked at his coffee, as if expecting it to do something.  
'Did you feel a change, a sort of shift in reality?'  
He looked up seriously and nodded. 'Yes, I felt it in Heaven but no one else seemed perturbed by it.'  
'I was perturbed.' She frowned down at the table. Something had happened, she felt that something fundamental had changed. Like a reality dam had broken, or a new moon was orbiting the earth.  
She choose her words carefully 'It felt like when I removed the Mark, a little.'  
Eons passed, the cafe around them crumbled and was rebuilt by aliens as a hostel for wayward youths, the earth died and was churned into rock and that rock flew off through the universe to seed new life and then Castiel answered, with a forced casualness.   
'Removing the Mark undid the work of God.'   
The sound of the cafe seemed to rush back around them. The street was getting full around them as people stopped in for breakfast and the espresso machine began to run at full speed.  
'So what was undone this time?'  
He looked at the patrons, at the aproned barista, then back to her. 'When we last spoke about this.' he began, only to quickly look away once more, scanning the crowd with nervous eyes.  
'Yeah, I know.'  
'I will look into it.'  
He stirred his spoon slowly through his cup, glancing out the window now at a tall man who had stopped to by a newspaper. She was relieved that Castiel didn't dismiss her, absolutely relieved that she wasn't crazy, she had felt that god was up to something and so had he.  
'How is Dean coping?' she asked, to move the conversation back to easier territory.  
'Guilt ridden, he cannot get passed his pain. He keeps telling me that he is OK.'  
'Ah, that never bodes well.'  
She looked at the Angel, Dean's baby in a trench-coat, he was the King of Heaven and he was her friend. They had lived together, they had binged all of Luther and Generation Kill together, he had healed her and she had healed him and they had shared the same Grace. She reached across the table and took his hand, gripping his fingers in her fist. If there was anyone she could trust to do right by the Winchesters, it was him more than it was her.   
'Temperance?' he asked, curiously.   
'I miss them. I miss Dean drumming on the steering wheel, I miss Sam sneaking vegetables onto his plate and trying to get him to exercise. I do miss them.'  
'Yes?' he had his hands folded together, his eyes boring holes into hers.  
'The thing is. I don't know if I should go back to them.'  
Castiel's thoughtful face fell, it was almost comical, how suddenly sad he had become. He had mastered the kicked puppy look.  
'Because of.' he made a show of looking upward and tapping his nose.   
'Well, there is that.' she agreed 'But, Dean needs someone more constant than me. I mean, if I go back through that door and go back into his life I will end up hurting him, because you and I both know I'm not the person who sticks around. He needs someone to stick around.'  
'And you need a home.' Castiel spoke gravely, as usual.  
'What?' It took her a minute or two to process that he had spoken.  
'You need a home, as Dean needs commitment and Sam needs routine. Why can't you all give that to each other? I do not understand this human penchant for heartbreak. You can be family, family, as I understand it, is loving beyond a persons faults.' he spread his hands, holding them palm up as if in offering.  
'I'm selfish.' she said 'And I'm not human and they deserve better.'  
'You are better than you think, Sister.' he touched her arm and vanished, leaving her with the bill for the coffee that they didn't drink. She pushed the saucer away, snapped up a few coins and dropped them on the table as she left.   
She was feeling heavy and awkward on her living feet. She couldn't pinpoint the feeling of unease, but it was there, it rumbled in the back of her head as the Mark had done.   
She wandered out into the sun, watching people go through their short lives. She caught sight of two boys running down the street. They were dressed in identical uniforms, swinging schoolbags off their skinny shoulders. As they reached the road they stopped, one put his hand on the others chest and checked for oncoming cars with painful care. When he was sure the road was clear he nodded and took the other boys hand, crossing the street safely.  
There was an old man playing the guitar on a corner, a cap at his feet for alms, she watched him, gave him the last of her cash and followed the cobbles towards a wooded hillside, there was a ancient cablecar there to get into the mountains, but it wasn't open yet. She took the zig-zagging path through the trees to the summit. There were a few fallen branches blocking the way, a few overgrown shrubs and plenty of tree roots to twist unsuspecting ankles, but she walked on, confidently.   
Cain had trained her on all sort of terrain, and she had her mothers deadly grace to ease her way. At the summit she saw a noticeboard of all the local wildlife, birds and bears and bats, and a closed stall that might sell anything. She sat on the board of this, crossing her legs and looking down the path.   
If god had changed something, it would be something to do with the course of the world, something to do with Destiny and the End, she couldn't imagine he'd re-write anything else, and anything smaller than the end of times surely wouldn't register against reality.  
Heaven was ruled by Castiel, they had killed Michael, caged Lucifer and she had taken over Hell, just like Chuck wanted. Of course, she was no longer in Hell, she was out, and she was planning to go to her family.   
Was that it, had he made a change so that she couldn't, had he made a change to force her back downstairs, away from his heroes.   
She turned her back on the woods and let herself fall through space, dragging herself around the globe, to America.

The garage door was open to the fresh air and there were two bodies bent over the Impala's fine turned engine, chatting in low voices. Temperance sat on a boulder looking in, watching them. John was slightly broader than Dean, and his shirt was pulled taut between his shoulder blades, but Dean had an inch or so in height on his father, he stooped a little more to look under the car's bonnet.  
They both had really, really nice arses. She briefly thought of smacking them, then decided against it.  
'You know.' she began, and had to smile when they both jumped and both swore as their heads collided with metal. 'I think that muscle monstrosity is about ready to retire.'  
She had arranged herself into a zen pose on the stone, like a starved Buddha who had been dressed for a rock concert, but uncrossed her legs now, hopping down onto the leaf strewn ground.  
Neither man spoke, but Dean took four long strides and wrapped her up in his arms and held her tightly to his chest. He was breathing hard. She counted to 20, then gently tried to untangle his arms.  
'Dean?' she gave up when he made no sign of moving.  
'You're back.' he breathed, so low she barely heard it.   
'No, this is all a boring as fuck dream. I'm your pillow, you're asleep.' she elbowed him, roughly enough that he grunted, but not so roughly that it really hurt. He let her go, smirking down at her.   
'I'm Temperance.' she held out her hand and John shook it.  
'John Winchester, I remember you. It did need a new expansion tank.' he jerked his thumb towards her car, under a dust cloth.  
She smiled and let Dean steer her indoors. 'Sam's gonna flip.' he said.  
He was in the library, as usual, studiously making notes in a thick notebook.  
'Tem!' his huge body unfolded as he leapt to his feet and pulled her into his arms. He lifted her off the floor in his haste to hug her. 'You're here! You're ok!'  
Sam's hands left her and his eyes darted over her body, looking for some sign of injury.  
'Yes.' she assured him.   
'I.' he shook his head, cutting himself off with a laugh.  
'This calls for a celebration!' Dean picked up a bottle of bourbon and poured everyone a glass. She recalled just how bad that stuff tasted.  
'Gone too fancy for us now?” he asked when she made a face.  
'I hate this stuff.' she drank it own, held out her glass for more.  
'We've beer! Come on.' they trooped into the kitchen, Dean kept his hand draped over her, when she sat he squeezed her shoulder before letting go.  
John had a pleasant smile on his face, watching his sons, but he held back, Temperance could feel his carefull eyes on her from behind his mild smile.   
'So, hows tricks?' she asked, while Dean took beer from the fridge.  
'Oh, well I'm writing a book, like a how to guide for hunters'. History and things. Men of letters stuff.' Sam explained  
'I'd like to read it.' she said.  
'Actually I figured you could add some stuff. You gotta know something new about Hell, right?'  
'I know where it is.'  
'Yeah, we know that!' Dean scoffed then he paused in the act of tasting his drink and narrowed his eyes. 'Do we? Do we know that? Shit where is Hell?'  
'It's inside your head' John spoke up, and she nodded at him, saluting with her bottle.  
The brothers both blanched and Temperance hastened to add. 'Not yours specifically. It's inside everyone's heads. Same as Heaven.'  
'How does that work?' Dean touched his temples, checking for bulges.  
'Well. Do you know whats outside the universe?'  
'No. There nothing outside the universe.' he looked perplexed.  
'Then what is it expanding inside, where is it?'  
'Shit, Tem, are you smoking again?' Dean asked, pushing her a beer bottle.  
'No. Well, yeah, but not right now. No, sorry I am explaining this wrong.' she took a breath, organising her thoughts. I  
t was a difficult concept to grasp and her physics was a little rusty, not to mention it was confused with her understanding of magic and faith and all that supernatural shit that didn't gel well with science.  
'Ok, its like this. There is a realm of physics and we are in it, we inhabit it. But our minds, our souls, what we are, exist elsewhere. We are bound to our bodies here and now but when we sleep and when we die, we get to leave that behind. We go to a place where we can't think about because it is thinking.'   
'That did not make anymore sense' Sam pointed out, he sat beside her, his big elbows crowding her on the bench.   
'Just trust me on this.' she shrugged, giving his arm a squeeze. He was reassuringly solid.  
'So, whats being the Queen of Hell like?' Sam asked.  
'Boring as shit, but I can do the thing now though.'  
'The thing?'  
She raised her fingers, as if to click them.' The thing. Magic without thought, its fecking fab.'  
He barked a long laugh, shaking his head, then he said, aside to John. 'She's gotta be the worst magic practitioner in existence.'  
'Oh come on, I'm good at curses, and my Dream spell worked a treat against the Virgin!.'  
'Shit! We gotta get food in for dinner.' Dean jumped up, interrupting them. He looked flustered.  
'Lasagne?' His dad asked.  
'We'll be right back, come on Sam.' Dean pulled his keys out and went to the door, where he spun, quickly around, almost catching his foot on the jamb. 'Don't leave, ok?'  
'Promise.' she crossed her heart.  
John Winchester was a curious presence and she wasn't sure what to speak to him about.  
'You're the Devil? No pointy horns and a red cape?' he was looking her up and down, as if disappointed.   
She rolled her head towards him, raised an eyebrow and put on her most sultry voice.  
'The Devil doesn't appear to you in costume, the Devil comes as everything you've ever wished for.' her voice was a purr, a gasp, as she searched his face with her mercurial eyes.   
Johns adams apple bobbed nervously as he swallowed, she dropped her bedroom eyes and knocked open a beer bottle with her lighter while shooting him a smirk.  
'I'm only messing with you.'  
He snorted, shaking his head a little. 'So, you know my boys pretty well.'  
'Yeah.'  
'Sam said you're like a sister and, well, you did a whole lot of shit to get me out of Hell.'  
'Thats what family does.' she passed him a beer. 'But I've seen three parents to the grave and I don't need another asshole of a father, so, forgive me if I don't call you pappy just yet.'  
'Hey, fair enough.' he opened his bottle with his belt buckle.   
She smiled, so Dean learned that one of his Dad too, she wondered in what other ways they were the same. If they moved the same way or had the same sneeze or something. They were dressed similarly, but maybe that was because they didn't have any other clothes to fit John.   
'Also, you know, Queen of Hell, who would want that for their daughter.'  
A slow smile spread over John's lips, that little flash of happiness made his eyes burn brighter, it made them look more like Sam's.   
'I still cant believe its all real, God and the Devil.' he took the seat across from her.   
'Well, gods AWOL and I've pulled Lucifer apart and locked whats left up in its own micro-reality, but yeah, there is a great power in the universe.'   
'Shit, is it you?' he joked.  
'Not yet.' she raised her beer and clicked it against his. 

Dean barely slept that night, it wasn't the lasagne sitting in his gut either. He got up, paced the length of the Bunker, thinking on Temperance.  
She had changed, he decided, more than he could say. She was definitely not human, she was something else and it made the hair on the bak of his neck stand up.   
He thought his dad felt it too, he was real reserved around her, he only looked at her to frown. He trusted his dads instinct, he just didn't know what that meant now.   
Temperance was sitting in the lounge, reading a book. When he greeted her she dropped it to her chest and raised her eyes to his.  
'I never should have asked you to do it, and I'm sorry.'  
Her face stilled, then, slowly, painfully slowly, a smile bloomed over her mouth. 'I forgive you for asking, but it was my choice and it's worked out ok, in the end.'  
Something slid off his chest, something heavy and oily. Guilt had weighed down his shoulders. She moved up on the couch and patted the free seat, for him.  
'Yeah?' he chuckled as he sat down, taking his time to enjoy his relief. 'My friend is the Devil! Thats pretty sweet.'  
'Oh honey, I am so much better than that prick.'  
'I dunno, you seem pretty tame?' he winked.  
She clicked her fingers, two horns pushed through her dark hair, a pitchfork solidified in her hand and she winked. He guffawed, and she burst into happy peals of laughter, clicking her fingers once more to send the disguise away.  
He had missed that, her laugh, not that he had ever heard it much. He missed having a girl, a woman, around. He missed her low voice and her long hair. It struck him, something else had been missing.  
'Remember that pie you made us, when you moved in?'  
'Yeah?' she smiled, perplexed.  
'Can you make it again?'  
She pretended to think about it, then nodded, sagely. He let out a whoop and dragged her to the kitchen and they began making a lump of pastry, while it rested he made coffee and nodded his approval when she spiked it with whiskey.  
Drinking steadily in a cheerful way, that Dean thought might be to cover their nerves at being around each other, they chatted while they worked.  
'Ok, em, Keith Moon or John Bonham?'  
'Pfft, Al Jackson Jr.' Temperance answered with a wave of her hand, scattering flour over the floor. 'My turn, Grace Kelly or Jane Mansfield?'  
'Mansfield, easy! What about, um, B.B King or Chuck Berry?'  
She tapped her fingers on the apples 'Hmm, tough one. King.'  
'Good answer.' he took a drink, weighed out sugar and rummage for a spoon to measure cinnamon. 'Come on, your turn.'  
'Lets see, beer or beef jerky?'  
'Hey! No fair! Shit, I can't answer that.'  
'Because its your whole diet?' her eye brow was raised, her upside-down smile in place.  
'I eat recess pieces too. Jerky, I'm sorry, I'm going with jerky.' he sighed.  
'For breakfast?' Sam had appeared with a bundle of papers and a laptop under his arm. 'Guys, its barely 9 am, why are you drinking?”  
'I'm miserable and he is a high functioning alcoholic.' Temperance gestured with a wooden spoon at Dean, who snorted into his fist.   
'And we're making a pie.'  
'Ok.' Sam sighed, shaking his head.   
'Is Dad up?' Dean glanced through the open door.  
'I don't think he's been sleeping too good, he was looking up Hunts last night for us.'  
'Oh.' Dean was still in two minds about Hunting with his Dad, part of him yearned for it, but another part of himself, a more sensible bit of his brain, didn't think it was a good idea. His Dad would want to be in charge, he would expect to be in charge, Dean and his brother had a good dynamic going, it would be hard to relinquish that.   
Temperance was casting a shrewd eye over him, as if she understood his turmoil.  
'Are you two still afraid of your dad?'  
'Afraid?' Dean began to argue, but couldn't help the cold dread that slipped down his spine at the question. He changed tack and scoffed at Temperance. 'Well, you were afraid of yours too!'  
Yeah, I killed him and sort of got over that.' she was sucking caramel off a tea spoon, her grey eyes resting on his green ones.   
'So, what you want us to kill our dad an be smiley happy people?  
'It might have positive physiological benefits.' she said sagely.  
Sam chose to ignore her remarks and sat down to watch them make a mess. Dean was carefully arranging pastry in a tin, but he was also pouring liberal amounts of Irish Coffee into tall mugs for them. There was a moments silence before Temperance resumed the round of questions, with enthusiasm.   
'I've another question! For Sam, pick one. Celine Dion or super-fast broadband?'  
Dean was bent double laughing, clutching onto the countertop to hold himself up, he was laughing so hard tears were running down his face.   
'They.' he hiccoughed 'Aint even the same type of thing! And we all know the answer.'   
'Celine Dion.' Sam mumbled, blushing to the tips of his ears and looking like he wished the ground to swallow him up.   
Over the braying laughter no one noticed John, leaning in the doorway, watching this all with an unfathomable look on his lined face.

They didn't burn the pie, which was a miracle, but both Temperance and Dean were hungover by lunchtime. They listening in silence to John's plans for cases, he had a few things for Sam to research and set these out in a no-nonsense way that made Temperance want to slap him.  
She wanted to say, these are your kids, you were in Hell, where is the fucking love gone. Sam did everything he asked, quickly, efficiently, without question. His back was ramrod straight around his father and Dean, she noticed, was subdued, as if he was biting his tongue.   
When John asked to see their weapons and supplies she stood up and offered to show him. Just to get him away from her boys.  
'What can you do, besides magic?'  
'I'm a killer.' she flashed a false smile.   
The weapons chest in Dean's room had a bit of everything, she pulled it out from under his bed and opened it, for John's inspection. He pulled out a baseball bat, wound round the top with barbed wire and smiled, fondly.  
'Theres a grenade launcher in Dean's car.' she said, resting her arms on the open lid while he looked through boxes of ammunition.  
'Whats this?' he had taken out a tin, like a medicine case, filled with vials.  
She took it from him and examined it, her recently acquired position in Hell had allowed her a type of power that was, at its heart, understanding. She could see the magic in those vials.   
'Borax and blood of the fallen, holy water.' she flicked through them, poking a few that were full of blood with suspicion. Dean's, Sam's, Castiel's and her own. She had no idea where he had gotten that and decided not to ask.   
'Magic.' he pulled a face.  
'Sorry, old timer, gotta keep up with the changes.'  
He smiled, or rather, his face creased into something like a smile. She knew that expression from Sam. It was his annoyed and better than you look. She was usually high when she saw it.  
'Ok, what else we got, fake Ids, cover stories?'  
'Dean's still handy with a laminator, but we actually have a fuck ton of money now, we can buy good identities if we need them. Who ever isn't on the job acts as our 'superior' when we need it.'   
'Oh, Bobby Singer used to do that.' he closed the lid of the chest and pushed it back, looking around the room as he stood.  
'I never met him, in this world, heard good things though.'  
'He didn't like me.'  
'I've heard thats not a strange occurrence.' Temperance had always been a little blunt. A lot blunt. She wasn't going to start reigning that in now.  
He scowled, turning on her with a harsh light in his eyes, she thought he must be used to being respected, treated like a four star general and never questioned.  
She spoke, before he could get angry. 'Your sons. They're both amazing, you fucked them up in plenty of ways, but they are both incredible. You did good, going to Hell from them, I'm not saying some of your actions haven't been very selfless.'  
'But it aint good enough for you?” each word laced with scorn. She opened up the dungeon, gestured to it for his inspection.  
'We can trap Demons here.'  
'Don't change the subject, you got a problem with me, then say it outright.'  
She waited until he was spitting with anger then said, in her most unimpressed tone. The same voice she had reserved for maths teachers.   
'I think you ruined two perfectly good people and you're not even sorry about it. You forced your living breathing kids to be weapons in your quest for vengeance and you have shite taste in music.'  
'I do not have shit taste in music!' he sneered, dragging his eyes along her body from head to toe. 'Some teenage anarchist isn't gonna tell me different.'  
'Punk, and I'm Sam's age.' she leaned against the door, crossing her arms. He examined the Trap and the warded chains hanging from the dungeon walls. Taking his time before turning back to her.  
'I am sorry about it.' he said, addressing her toes.   
'About?' she pressed, not willing to let this stranger off easily.  
'Ruining my kids lives.' his broad shoulders dropped, and he shoved his fists into his pockets. She didn't think she'd get used to seeing the boys mannerisms on that body.   
'You should be.' she went to her room, wanting to be alone, but he followed. Dragging his feet with every step.  
'Why do you do this? Live with them, Hunt with them?'  
'I love them, I worry about them, I have no one else.'  
'You ever think they'd be better off without you?'  
She cant help the laugh that escapes her lips, because yes, of course, she thinks that every day, every other moment.   
'Yes, always. I'm the better off alone type, but they're they only people left in the world for me. I need to be around them, to make sure they're safe. One day I'll leave, because thats me, I'm fucking eternal and can't be held the fuck down, but until then, I'm here, for them.'  
'You reading my mind?' he shoot her a look from beneath his brows and sat at her desk chair.  
'Good lord, don't tell me we're anything alike. I don't think my fragile metal health could handle it.'  
There was an open bottle of gin on the table, Temperance sniffed this drank it and decided it wasn't fit for guests. She pointed until John opened on of the desk drawers and pulled out a naggin of something viscous and golden in colour.   
'Spiced rum.' she explained and motioned him to drink it.  
He screwed the lid back on and threw it across to her with a nod.  
'Dean told me a lot about you, don't know if half of its true.'  
'I'm sure its all lies.'  
'You're half Angel, Half Demon, play the cello and you dated the last King of Hell?'  
'Oh, well, ok all of that is true.'  
'He said that your dad was pretty rough, said that you had it bad. The way he said it made me think he doesn't realise how shit I was at being a father.'  
'John, before we get into this, I'm an emotionally repressed selfish cunt. I'll listen and tell you what I think but I'm not a fucking psychologist. I don't know if you need to be forgiven or what, but I've never had a kid and I don't want one, so I might not be much use to you here. I can tell you a few true things, you were a shit parent, they both have self esteem issues and are dangerously codependent, and they are the best people I've ever met, but they don't fucking party enough.'  
He looked taken aback so she hastened to add 'I put the fun in this dysfunctional nightmare we live in.' she threw him back the rum.  
They drank in silence, passing the bottle back and forth until John, spinning thoughtfully on the chair said.  
'You said you don't want a family, but I think you do. I can tell by your actions, you keep trying to do right by my boys and you are angry as fuck at me for not being the best dad I could be. Thats why your afraid of sticking around for them because you think you'll do something and it will tear your family apart and you'll be alone, again. You're so focused on failure that you're afraid of trying.'  
'You want a medal Mr. Perceptive?'  
'Don't get mad at the truth, hon.'  
Her eyes narrowed at that. 'Lucifer used to call me hon.'  
'I aint the devil, princess.'  
She carefully delved his body, finding nothing of the ex-Archangel in his flesh. She was't about to force her way into his mind to go looking. He seemed to understand her hesitation and said, with a sort of forced casualness said. 'Look if you want to.'  
His thoughts, his feelings, all of them were there shoved violently to the forefront of his mind. She felt everything he felt, every ounce of shame, every bitter regret. It didn't stop, it wouldn't stop, Dean's self loathing was a gentle breeze compared to this. She pulled back gasping and found that she had pulled John into her arms.  
She cradled his head, like a child and rocked him against her. 'Fuck me.' she managed.  
He was crying, hot tears were staining her shirt, he fisted a handful of the material at her back and sobbed into her shoulder.   
'Its ok, its alright, I've got you.' she rubbed his back, infantilising the man, the father, on the floor with her. She wondered how anyone could carry all of that around inside of them, she knew self loathing, she knew pain, but the weight and ferocity of his hatred would have worn her down to death. After a time, when he had stopped crying and his breathing had evened out, he pulled back.  
'I'm sorry.' she said, meaning she was sorry about thinking he was fucking Lucifer, sorry that he hated himself so much.  
He shrugged, rubbing the back of his hand over his nose and sniffing. 'Its fine.'  
She stood up and offered him a hand, which he took. 'You wanna know my next big, world shattering plan?”  
'What else is there?'  
'I want to kill god.' she laid out her open hands. To his credit, he did nod as if this wasn't a catastrophic statement to make.  
'Ok.'  
'Dean and Sam probably do not want to kill god, I feel like I could swing Cas round to it though.'  
'Can that wait until after a Hunt, after I get used to being alive again?' he managed a weak laugh.  
'Sure, but, I don't think the boys should Hunt with you. I think it will end in tears.'  
'I don't mind flying solo.'  
'No, I'm coming with you. Bitch, we are going to fucking bond.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi all! any comments or advice would be welcome :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ....'What was the Cage like?'  
> He stopped breathing, she looked up, his eyes were out of focus, his lips compressed into a thin line.  
> 'I don't remember much, Cas is giving it back to me bit by bit.'  
> 'What do you remember?'  
> 'Pain.' he grunted. He reached over, took her whiskey and gulped it down, before ordering two more.  
> When the drinks arrived he continued. 'The Devil used me as a goddamn punching bag. He tore me up to see what made me tick. He made me think horrible things, he made me feel them. It hurt, every second felt like 100 years. I went pretty crazy, shit, I went crazy almost before the first minute was up. It was something more than torture, worse than torture.'....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

Dean knew that his face wouldn't give him away, so when John said he was taking Temperance on a hunt, shouldn't be more than a day, he had said, Dean was confident that no one would read anything into his expression.  
He was confident right up until Temperance murmured in his ear, 'I'm not going to fucking sleep with him, relax.'  
That wasn't what he was worried about, but he appreciated her empathy. He was more afraid of her coming back in pieces, or of his dad getting cut up and bleeding out, he was afraid of losing them both, again.   
'Maybe we should all go?' he flicked a look at Sam whose pulse was bouncing slightly in his throat. He was worried too.   
'Who's on point?' she asked, looking between them.  
'Well, em.' Sam trailed off, no doubt he had been about to say that Dean was in charge, as always, but hesitated.  
'Exactly.' Temperance's eyes flashed a little.   
Dean let them go with a reluctant wave from the door and stomped into his room. Just because she was right didn't make it sit better with him. Yeah, it would be hard having to obey his father and his father would find it hard to obey him, or Sam, or Temperance, for that matter. John was used to being in charge.   
He threw himself onto his bed, scowling, muscle memory making him reach beneath the pillow and grip his handgun. There was a couple of pictures on his dresser, he looked these over, lost in thought.   
There was his mom and dad when they were young, Sam and Castiel leaning against the Impala, and a picture he had meant to put back. A photo of Temperance, she was giving the camera two fingers, he had taken it out of her room when she had gone to Hell. John Constantine must have taken it, no way Crowley would have taken a picture of her wearing worn-out jeans.   
He reached for it, sitting up to look at it in his hand. It was impossible to tell how old she was in it, the vague 20-something face she had worn for as long as he knew her didn't narrow it down.   
He had taken the photo from her room because he thought he might forget what she looked like. It terrified him when he had realised there was no smell or taste he associated with her, no perfume or soap or food. When he smelled leather he thought of his dad, when he ate peanut butter he thought about Sam and the awful banana sandwiches he used to eat, when he smelled rain on the air he thought of Castiel. His memory was physical, he needed real things, real associations.   
He had been in the kitchen, drinking a beer that she liked, but it didn't remind him of her. He realised that and set the bottle down, waiting from something to jog his memory, then he had run to her room looking for her, looking for something that was her, panicking.  
A pile of old black shirts said nothing, a tube of mascara could belong to anyone, she used the toothpaste that they all used, the soap they all used, the air in the room wasn't stale or scented, it just smelled like the rest of the goddamn house.   
Dean had torn the place apart in a quiet frenzy, looking for something, he didn't know what. This picture had fallen out of a book, a novel by Salman Rushdie, just as he was about to give up, so he had taken it and put it in a frame. He made himself memorise the lines of her body, the shape of her hands, until he was sure he'd never forget.   
He had to remember her, he needed to always remember, because he had messed up and she had suffered for it.  
Dean swore blind that he would never let that happen again, thats what he had told himself, except he had done just the opposite. He had sent her with his Dad, he had put her in the care of someone who broke people.   
A reasonable voice inside his head kept saying that Temperance was nobodies fool, she could and would handle herself, she would stand up to John, and she would also make sure he stayed safe. She was powerful, she could protect him.  
Dean knew nothing would go wrong but, goddamn it, all he could see was her bloody in his arms, writhing on the ground in pain, he could see her taking beating after beating, he could see her taking the Mark of Cain. She was only invincible because of what he had put her through.  
His phone beeped in his pocket and he pulled it out, putting the picture aside.   
'Hello Dean.' the message read.  
He snorted 'Cas you can come in!' he said, aloud.  
The Angel pushed open the door. 'You told me not to enter a bedroom, especially when the door was closed.'  
'Yeah, but you know, knock man.' he got up off the bed.  
'I wished to talk to Temperance but she has turned off her cell phone and I can no longer feel her presence due tot he cloaking effect of Hell.'  
'Oh, ok, well, she's with Dad. Whats up?'  
'I want to speak to her about closing the Gates.' he explained, looking around the room, as per usual as if he had never seen a room before.  
'She wont do it, we know that.'  
'I thought perhaps she would, if I were to close Heaven.'

John liked classic rock and Temperance instantly regretted driving, she was trapped on a road trip with a guy she didn't know who listened to the same crap Dean forced on them all.  
'So, all these kids have gone missing, one every dark moon since last year. Some of them are classed as runaways, but the timings to similar. My monies on them getting snatched for some ritual.' John explained.  
'The dark moon is a bad time for most magic, all its good for is curses. If lunar-power is your thing. I can't see a Witch needing a blood sacrifice that often though.' she considered all the Witches she had ever known, and shook her head.   
'Maybe its a few of them, a whole coven?'  
'Nah, come on, one child a year would be enough for 10 Witches, at least.' that amount of power could rip the sky open, she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel   
'You, uh, wanna roll out some sympathy there kid?'  
'Oh, sorry.' she flashed an awkward smile at him, spread out on the passenger side of the car. She did feel bad for them families, and she hated the thought of kids been taken, or killed. Sam and Dean would have known she didn't mean to seem cruel.   
He rolled his eyes, thumbing through a journal. 'You know how to kill a Witch? They can be tricky.'  
'Yeah, I know how.' she frowned, she knew how to kill everything now, just not herself.   
The town was small, the surrounding settlements had sprung up around lumber yards and logging offices. The child had been snatched at some stage after he had gotten off the school bus. He had been seen rounding the corner of the road to take the path to his house, but he had not come home.

John toed the earth around the ditch that ran on either side of the round, crouched down and sniffed it. 'You should talk to the family, got any grown-up clothes?'  
She felt a little laugh in the back of her throat, and changed into a horrible pencil dress that screamed boring office job. It had been folded in her go bag for a while, with a cardigan, skin coloured tights and sensibly tall heels. The mother answered the door, she showed her in, as Dr. Angela Trimble, and brought her to the boys room.   
Temperance let her eyes flicker when the woman wasn't looking and saw it. The boy had made it home, he had walked into this room already cursed and it had left a trail as dark and heavy as if he had walked bloody footprints through the place.   
'Invisibility?' John sounded incredulous. They were sitting in a steak house, it was dark outside and the windows were fogged from the heat of the diners within.   
'I've never seen anything like it. Ever.' she had devoured her steak, cooked in the bloody middle between raw and rare, and was eyeing the remains of John's with interest.  
He pushed it towards her, wiping his mouth on a heavy napkin. 'Me neither, shit, might need to ask the boys to look that one up for us.'  
'You do it.' she urged, practically drinking up the remnants of his gravy.  
He tapped out a text like an old guy, an out of practice one at that, with one finger. She poured him beer from the pitcher they had ordered, it was yellow and fizzy and tasted like it looked, namely, yellow and fizzy.  
'Sam's on it.' he grunted, after a few moments.   
'Whats the point, like, of making the kid invisible. What does that achieve?' she mused.  
'Kid gets scared, maybe he runs around and the Witch finds him, says they can see him and then the kid follows willingly? I aint too sure. Maybe its a Pied Piper thing.'  
'John.' she frowned down at her beer and ordered a whiskey.  
'Yeah?'  
'What was the Cage like?'  
He stopped breathing, she looked up, his eyes were out of focus, his lips compressed into a thin line.   
'I don't remember much, Castiel is giving it back to me bit by bit.'  
'What do you remember?'  
'Pain.' he grunted. He reached over, took her whiskey and gulped it down, before ordering two more.  
When the drinks arrived he continued. 'The Devil used me as a goddamn punching bag. He tore me up to see what made me tick. He made me think horrible things, he made me feel them. It hurt, every second felt like 100 years. I went pretty crazy, shit, I went crazy almost before the first minute was up. It was something more than torture, worse than torture.'  
She nodded, phrasing her next question very carefully. 'Do you know if it hurt him too?'  
He scowled, his fingers wrapping around his glass. 'No, I don't think it did, maybe it worked on him once, I don't know.'  
'The one I made, or, you know, himself upstairs made through me.' she flicked her eyes upward, suddenly unsure about speaking the name of god aloud.   
'Yeah?'  
'It is made of madness, its made from raw power. It will keep hurting him. Forever.'  
'Huh, that actually makes me feel a little better.'  
'Really?' she quirked a brow at him.  
He drank quickly, she kept up, she could sober them up if they suddenly needed to be sober and she was sure she could walk in these high heels.   
'You really got Demon power, I mean, you're the new Devil, the real deal?'  
'Yeah, its.' she wasn't sure what 'it' was though. She was in the hot seat, she was the Queen of Hell, she owned the place, but it wasn't part of her. She didn't care about it.  
He seemed to understand, he nodded. 'Yeah, I bet.'  
She flashed him a smile, befreo paying the bill with Crowley's fortune.   
They had rented rooms in an old style boarding house, they had to share a pink bathroom, but it was comfortable enough and it beat sleeping on motel room couch with Sam's snoring.  
'Can I ask you something?' John was brushing his teeth and had opened the door to her room after a little knock.  
'Sure.' she watched his arm move, watch muscle and tendon ripple and glide under sallow skin.   
'You're, uh, pretty neutral from what I can understand. So, why did you take over the job downstairs?'  
'Ah. Trillion dollar question.' she sat down on the narrow bed, pulled off her shoes and tossed them towards the door.   
He rinsed his mouth with surgical smelling mouthwash and turned back to her, a question in his look.  
'I was afraid that if I didn't, that, uh, Chuck, might make Sam or Dean do it.' She was unsurprised when he just nodded at that and closed the door.  
It was an idea that had haunted her, Sam was a vessel for Lucifer, did that make Dean a vessel for Micheal. If she hadn't been involved in all of this, if their dad hadn't resealed the Cage, would they both have been possessed and forced to murder each other. Would they have been used in some epic final battle. Two human brothers, two Archangels, two great powers, good and evil.   
She didn't sleep anymore, she didn't need to and had gotten used to not doing it. It made her acutely aware of becoming less human. She lay down, under the covers, eyes open, and considered her existence without the benefit of ayahuasca.

Sam got back by breakfast time, granola and blueberry pancakes served by the angry house owner. He had found a spell and a few records of its use, but had no insight into what exactly was going on.   
John didn't seem to worried about this, if anything he looked thrilled with the mystery, much like Sam would be. He told her to look out for the Witch while he asked around about the other missing kids. So she searched, with her Demon eyes on, dark glasses hiding the fact from the nice, normal, townsfolk.   
There was something, a trail leading to the woods.  
'Huh.' she squatted down at the edge of a stream, there was magic here, just not recent. It didn't look like Witchcraft, it looked older than that. A line of a poem sprung up in her head, she could almost see it printed across the page of a school book. 

''Come away, O human child!  
To the waters and the wild  
With a faery, hand in hand,  
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.''

She was almost positive that fairies didn't exist in America, this was the land of Tinkerbell not Tatiana. She called John, walking slowly back to the town, and he promised to meet her by the Library. 

The building was made of yellow brick and stood almost in the centre of the small town. It had a new flag hanging from its iron balcony and the mullioned windows were pocked, here and there, as if chipped by stones. A brass placard on the wall explained that building had been fired on by Britain during the Civil War, it had survived thanks to a timely storm that that swept the British encampment away.   
John ambled down the steps towards her. 'Man, theres a lot of missing kids in this Town's history.' he said, by way of greeting.  
'I'm starting to think that its not a Witch we're after.'  
'Yeah?'  
'I think, it might be a god.'  
'A god?' he laughed. 'Kid you've met God, you know there aint others!'  
'Spirits become gods, in peoples minds. They get power from the idea and become what people think they are.' she tried to explain to him about the Dreaming, but he seemed less convinced when she had finished.  
'My money is still on Witchcraft.' he climbed into the car and she drove them to the woods, where she had found the magical residue. He insisted on bringing a gun.  
He bent down, poured salt on the earth, frowned when it didn't sizzle.   
'OK, so maybe this aint Witchcraft.' he conceded, graciously.   
'Theres that thing in town, did you see it, during your Civil War the place was saved by a storm, and then theres the fact the recent kid went invisible. Its just, what the fuck would a Witch gain from fucking around with the victim like that, its a waste of power. What do they need so many kids for too?'  
'So, what would a god be doing with them?'  
'Keeping them from growing up, Peter pan style? She shrugged, pushing her hands into her pockets and scuffing the ground with her toes. 'I know a ritual to try and figure it out, but its, eh, you know, Demonic.'  
'Ok.'  
'Ok?'  
'Um, yeah, lets do it.' he looked taken aback.  
'The boys would have fought me on that.' she shrugged, sitting down in the dirt, legs crossed.   
She thought of full moons and things that went bump in the night, she thought of waves and periods and lunacy. She let her eyes go black, she let her mind reach out. The woods were still there around her, but there was something beyond them now. Something softer. A grove, full of long grass and moving water. She reached out for John's arm, bringing him under her spell.  
'Woah!' he exclaimed, a tremor of fear in his voice.  
The air around them was full of summer insects, chiming bells and laughter. 'This is fucking weird.'  
They tread carefully under dropping eaves that simply hadn't been there before, and found themselves standing in a clearing, with a hundred or more children gazing up at them, unblinking.   
'Jesus!' Temperance jumped back.  
'Ok, thats a little unsettling.' John waved his hand in front of the nearest kid, a girl. Her marble like eyes didn't move, so he touched a finger to her crumbling cheek.  
'Are they stone?'  
'Looks like.' he agreed, shuffling away.  
The statue children were in various states of decay, some had features so worn that they only vaguely resembled people.   
They both spotted the recently missing boy, he was sitting with his thin arms curled over his knees, obvious tears frozen on his face. Temperance felt a little stab sympathy for him and looked away.   
'So, whose in charge?'  
'I am.'   
Temperance was sure, was positive, it had been a tree, but the creature speaking to them was definitely not a tree. It had long, matted, hair that reached to the ground, and was dressed in a toga-like gown woven from leaves and vines. Its face was gnarled and ancient, with bright eyes hidden behind crags and folds of weather beaten skin.  
'And who are you?'  
'I am a god, little Devil. The god of this wood.'  
John took half a step forward, shielding Temperance slightly with his bulk. She tried to push away the little flash of irritation that rose in his mind at that, a fucking demi-god of some back-arse-of-nowhere wood wasn't going to hurt her, so pack away you're sexist bullshit. Dean had a habit of doing that to, though, when he did it, she felt safe, not annoyed.  
'Well I'm John Winchester, and you better stop taking kids.' he snarled, dropping the barrel of his shotgun over his arm, threateningly.   
'I do not take them.' The god wheezed, swaying forward. It moved horrifically, like a sped up video or a poor stop motion animation. Its limbs were jerky and mismatched.   
'They are called here.' It was standing less than 2 meters away now, but had come to a stop, its long, spindly fingers, outstretched to the nearest marble child.   
'Why?'  
'The settlement made a pact with me, though it has long forgotten it. One child for every tree that falls. One child to replace the wood.'   
Temperance cast a troubled, searching look over the children and saw that their feet were all buried under the soil, like they had been planted there.  
'Well, we're here to stop that.'  
'You cannot.' It examined them, Temperance felt it trying to look through her, but it couldn't get past the surface level punk, John shivered as if he had been doused in ice when the god looked over him.   
'Ah! Immortals' It croaked.  
Temperance saw John note the word, saw him go suddenly pale and she wrapped her fingers around his arm, tugging him back. Part of her had been worried about his new body, part of her groaned.   
'Listen, god thing, I'm the fucking Devil. My ma was a Demon, my father was a fucking Archangel. I've got power coming out the wazoo. You want to die or let the kid go?'  
'Letting him go would kill me.'  
'Fine by me.' she raised her fingers to snap, anger was pounding her blood through her veins. The ones who messed with kids were the worst, and she suddenly need to kill something.

The trees around them snapped to attention, a roaring wind pushed the branches about and battered John and Temperance to the ground. Temperance struggled up, her eyes flashing with their rarely used, brilliant Grace.   
A branch whipped across her cheek, but it couldn't shed blood. She took a step forward against the gale, pushing her boot firmly into the grass. The god raised its clenched fist and the ground rolled beneath her.  
'Temperance!' John had been flung back and grabbed by the trees, roots began to crawl over him holding him firmly in-place. She threw out a hand for his shotgun and, hating herself, hating everything about it, aimed at the nearest child.  
'You think I wont?” she shouted, across the storm.  
The god opened its creased mouth, a boiling sound broke from behind its teeth and a hard rain pelted down from the suddenly dark sky.   
She pulled the trigger.  
Buck-shot blasted fragments of stone into the air, and the figure crumbled to dust. The storm didn't abate, frantically she looked to find the newest child. Her heart was heavy. The older statues hadn't any life left for him to use.   
'Sorry kid.' she pushed the barrel of the gun against the wind and into the child's neck.   
'I am the mother fucking Devil you silly cunt. Stop!'  
The storm dropped away, so suddenly it left her ears ringing, and the trees withdrew, allowing John to scramble towards her. He wrenched the gun from her hands with a growl.  
'I have a compact with this place, Devil. You have no authority to overwrite it.' the god stretched out a hand and a spear of dark wood shot up from the ground.  
Temperance felt it pierce her side and she shouted at the sudden shock of pain.  
'Well I fucking do.' John snarled, and with that, he fired.  
Stone, blood and sparks of something blue and glittering flew up into the air in a horrible cloud. The god cried out and made to start forward, but its feet would not move. It seemed to stoop, as if a great weight had settled on its shoulders.   
The earth gave a sigh, and in a rush the statues all trembled and fell, grey rock powder coated the grass and settled heavily around the tree roots, sapping the colour from the wood.   
Temperance looked up at the god, its legs were fast becoming real wood, already thin brown leaves were sprouting from its hands.  
'You.' its lips didn't seem to want to move, its tongue worked furiously as moss began to creep up from the back of its throat and spill over its wrinkled chin.  
In a moment, it, the god, was gone. A crooked tree, half dead already, stood in the grove. Then around them the grove began to waver and the real world poked through. The earth bound woods were calm, cold and dark.  
John fell to the ground beside her. 'Shit! You're ok, you're ok. Don't worry, I got you.'  
'John, its fine.' she pushed his hands away.  
'Don't move!' he warned her, trying to put pressure back on her gut.  
She had to use her Grace to heal, so her eyes glowed briefly in the sudden dusk. 'I'm fine.' she explained as he slumped, pale and panting for breath.   
'Its ok. I'm ok, I don't get hurt, not really. Its ok. I'm ok.' she reassured him, squeezing his sticky fingers.   
'I, I thought. I.' he shook his head, then, broke down in tears. She froze in place, hands over his heaving shoulders  
'I cant do it, I can't watch my children die!' he wailed.  
Oh, the immortality, she realised grimly. That was a difficult one to get dropped on you.   
'I've watched everyone I love die, I've killed a fair few of them, and I can never join them. God made it so I can't ever, ever, go to them. I'm stuck living, as much as I don't want to be.' She wanted to explain that he wasn't alone, but she knew what it felt like, to know you were never going to die. It was a lonely feeling.  
'How can you stand it?'  
'Not very well.' she shifted on the hard ground, unsure how to help.  
'I can't live forever. I want to die, I want to see my wife again, see my friends again. I don't wanna watch my kids get old.' he sounded haggard.  
'You wont, I'll sort it out, ok? Trust me.' she hesitated, not sure if he needed her to lift him up and waited until he got to his feet alone before offering him her hand.  
'Come on.' John said, tugging her along.

They sat it the car, both staring at nothing.   
'That was horrible.' she said, at length, turing the key in the ignition.  
He nodded, looking down at his dusty hands.  
They left the town, drove out on a deserted rode until they got to a diner, where they ordered food then stared at it, without appetite.   
'I need a drink.' he said, leading the way to a bleak little bar.  
It had sawdust on the floor, the air smelled a little like piss and the tabletop was sticky. Temperance ordered a bottle of whiskey and decided to forgo the glasses. They sat, passing the bottle back and forth, ignoring the bearded barman who cast them worried looks every now and again.  
'So what, I'm just gonna be a Hunter forever, will I turn into a monster that other Hunters come after?' John asked bitterly, after an hour of silent thought.  
'At least you're still human, I'm on the clock up here. Chuck will find out and send me back down to Hell eventually.'  
'You got friends down there?' a hint of concern in his voice.  
'One.'  
'Well, hey, you can keep sending me monsters to deal with. To keep me busy.'  
'You don't have to keep doing this. Dean wishes he could do something else, you know. He's been in it too long. Sam's got one foot out the door, the men of letters stuff, he's really taking to it. He's a shit hot hunter but he's a scholar at heart.'  
'I put too much on them, i made Dean grow up too fast. Shit, he's been cleaning up after me since he was 6. He's been taking my shit since his mom died. He never complained.' his voice dropped to a growl, his hand on the bottle trembled.   
'I know that eats at you too. I've been in your head.' she tapped his temple, for emphasis.  
He nodded, offered her the whiskey with a shrug.  
'You don't have to explain it to me, I mean, I understand. Dean doesn't though, you're going to have to talk this out with him, one way or another.'  
'I know.' he sighed.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...'We raise the Cage and speak to Lucifer.' he stabbed his index finger onto the table.  
> There it was, she looked down at her feet, half expecting to encounter some dream-like figure, some sign that this wasn't real. Now it was Temperance's turn, now she would shake her head, now they would be against each other. The dream team was about to fracture.....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

John went to his room without speaking when they arrived home, it was late and she wanted to get away from him. There was something decidedly unsettling about him, it had nothing to do with his immortality and everything to do with the anger he carried around inside him. She was the Devil, she knew these things.  
The Bunker had never felt homely, but she was glad to see it when she threw open the door. Someone, Sam presumably, had the lights burning in the Library and she turned her feet that way, still wired from the trip.  
'Hey!' Sam looked up from his computer, smiling kindly.   
'You'll get square eyes.' she tilted her chin to the computer screen, its hard blue light was much brighter than the ancient lamps around them.  
'Whatever, mom. So, what happened?'  
'Some sort of local god, as it turned out.'  
'Weird.' he shook his head, making a note on his pad of paper.   
'You pulling an all nighter? Is there a big test on tomorrow?' she teased, poking her head around to read the screen.  
'Oh, very funny.' he shut the lid on his laptop and stood up. Temperance never failed to be amazed by just how huge Sam was. She tried to judge if he had grown since they had met, maybe he was part giant, maybe a healthy diet really did do wonders for a person. He was putting books away, ambling around the shelves with a half smile on his face, content in his element.   
'Can I start calling you Sammy?'  
'Fuck no.'  
'But you are large and intimidating.' she pressed.  
'Tem, you're the Queen of Hell, you could smite me with a finger!'  
'Yeah, but, I'd never smite an adorable little Sammy.'  
He sighed. 'One time, I'll let you say it once!'  
'Thank you! I'm gonna shower.'  
Sam wished her a goodnight and headed to his own bed, while she went into the bathroom. She turned the shower on hot and sagged under the spray. Hot water made everything better, she reasoned, humming to herself, just to hear the echo of her voice.  
When she had arrived back on Earth her biggest worry had been god, now she was shit scared about John Winchester on top of that. If he was truly immortal there might not be a way to fix him,nothing she knew off hand anyway. There was a chance of course that it was a curse, or a spell, or something they could break. She hoped for that as she scrubbed her long hair.  
Sighing she thought over the hunt, Dean wouldn't have shot the kid, the statue. He would have worked around it. 'Constantine would have though.' she muttered, to herself. Dean said his dad was ruthless and that he was. John Winchester was looking to be as ruthless as Constantine, as ruthless as Temperance herself was. She washed her teeth with more force than was necessary, trying to clear a bad taste out of her mouth.  
'Hey.' Dean knocked on the bathroom door and pushed it open. He had his hand over his eyes, but was peaking through his fingers.   
'Not naked.' she spat into the sink.  
'Damn.'   
She rinsed out her mouth and turned around to him. 'Whats up?'  
'How did the hunt go?'  
'Ok, em, theres something we all need to talk about. Well, that you dad needs to talk about, but it might be better to wait till tomorrow.'  
He looked worried at that and she spread her hands, helplessly. 'Its not my thing to tell.'  
'I was gonna have a good nights sleep but, thanks for throwing that out to me.'  
'You've not had a good nights sleep since you were born.' she winced, knowing this was true but meaning it playfully.  
He had a strained sort of smile on when he said.   
'Um, Cas dropped by. He wanted to talk to you.'  
Curious, Temperance pulled out her phone and turned it on, seeing the missed calls and messages. 'Ah, shit, I'll call him back.'  
She paused beside Dean in the door frame. He was looking at her, half a smile hitched on his face. 'What?” she asked, on guard.  
'I just, missed you, is all. You don't, uh, stick, when you're not here.'  
'Oh, right, thats the warding.' she raised her wrist, marked with a little stamp, as usual.   
'I forgot about them.' he took her wrist, brushing a thumb over the waterproof ink she had used. She let her arm rest there a moment, in his warm fingers, then moved away.  
'I'll call the Angel.'

Castiel appeared with his usual sudden flurry of feathers. 'Hello.'  
'You rang, several times?'  
'I left a voicemail.' he insisted.  
'And I didn't listen to it.' she threw the phone behind her, where it bounced on the bed.  
'Temperance, I wish to talk about closing the Gates of Hell.'  
'You know I'm in two minds about that.' she dropped back onto her pillows, arms spread wide.  
'I have spoken with my brethren. We are not a majority, but I believe I can convince them to close Heaven.' he sat on the end of the bed, it creaked a little beneath his added weight.  
That got her attention, ignoring the spike in her heart rate, she sat up straight, not believing her ears. 'What?'  
'I have spoken with.' he began to repeat himself, but she cut him off, laying a finger over his lips.  
'You'll close Heaven?'  
'Yes.'  
She threw her arms around him, shrieking with laughter 'Seriously!'  
'Indeed.' he had his hands awkwardly around her middle, he looked tense so she let him go.   
'Thank you.'  
'It will depend on my convincing the others, I may require your assistance.'  
'Anything.' she took both of his hands in her own, unable to wipe the grin off her face. Finally, something was going to go right.  
'I am glad that you are happy with this development. I did worry that, perhaps, you would no longer desire the things you did before your, um, transformation. That the Throne of Hell would corrupt you.'  
'I was too corrupt to be corrupted!'  
'Yes, I believe that.' he said as he took his leave, abruptly as always.  
She got under her blanket, thinking how much she had changed. She was an abomination, a punk with ill defined morals. She had changed in ways even she couldn't put into words, but she was happy then. Happy that something might be going right, happy that she was on the right path, for once. 

Happiness never lasted, she wasn't sure why she bothered with it. By morning John had broken the news to his sons, that he was immortal, and they were both taking it badly.  
Castiel had been summoned, he had scanned John, down to his molecules and folded his arms grimly. He had missed it the first time, the magic hadn't fully taken hold until after he had been on Earth for several weeks.  
'Its an enchantment. Lucifer's work.'  
'Well, how do we undo it?' John pressed, he had a cup of coffee before him, but hadn't touched it and the murky liquid had long since cooled in the chipped cup.  
'These type of enchantments are extremely complex. They can be removed, by the creature that cast it. Or by that creature's death.' Castiel said, looking shiftily between John and Temperance.  
'Well, Lucifer's as good as dead, he technically doesn't exist anymore.' she pointed out.  
'Yes, but, this type of magic Temperance, you know it is not that straight forward.'  
'Can I break it? I am him now.' That was an interesting sentence to say, it felt prophetic. There was a lingering weight to those words which almost seemed to echo in the kitchen. She had a horrible idea that she knew where this was going. It was like hearing voices out of sync, like watching a badly dubbed film.  
'I doubt it.' Castiel looked disheartened, there was a droop to his shoulders and a sad set to his mouth.  
Temperance barely heard him, she saw it all, laid out, like a line on a map. Dean would want the cage opened, he would want the Devil raised to free his father. Lucifer, of course, would refuse, he would get out of his chains and they would all be fucked. Temperance, in particular, would be fucked, because he could kill her and she knew that he would this time.  
'Ok.' Dean set down his mug, his face creased into a serious expression. It was his Hunting look, the look no one could argue with it. He was the boss, they had to follow.  
Sam had taken his dads hand on the table, tentatively, he still seemed a little unsure around the man, and they both looked up, hopefully at Dean.  
'We raise the Cage and speak to Lucifer.' he stabbed his index finger onto the table.  
There it was, she looked down at her feet, half expecting to encounter some dream-like figure, some sign that his wasn't real. Now it was Temperance's turn, now she would shake her head, now they would be against each other. The dream team was about to fracture.  
She could feel the 'No' forming on her tongue, she could see the outcome of it unfolding. Something inside her screeched that she didn't have to play along with this, that she must not play along with this.  
Spluttering, she stopped the word in her mouth, looked sharply around and raised a hand for silence.   
This was wrong, this was scripted, she could see it for fucks sake. She raised her fingers and clicked them. Time solidified around her, dust motes hung unmoving in the air and the humans froze solid.   
Castiel looked a little alarmed.  
'Temperance?'  
'Something's not right.' she said, taking his hand and warding them against anyone who might be listening.   
'How so?' he cast a very skeptical glance, one that he must have learned from Sam, over the still scene before them.  
'I think that I knew this would happen, its like deja vous. I've seen it happening as it is happening.' she licked her lips, speaking felt difficult. Doing anything suddenly seemed far too difficult, but she pressed on.   
'What do you mean?, It is unlikely we are operating under the influence of a spell.'  
'Not a spell, a story.' she looked around, the back of her neck prickling with certain fear. She expected to see someone standing right behind her.   
'A story?'   
'The story.' she clarified.  
She shook her head, she couldn't explain it, not here. 'Please, can you trust me on this. Something is wrong. I need you to say to Dean that we can't raise Lucifer, that you will look into the enchantment. That there may be an Angelic way.'  
'That is untrue.' he frowned, worry clouding his blue eyes.   
'I know, but once I figure this out we can tell them the truth, just not now. Something is very wrong now. ' she squeezed his hand, praying for him to agree and was rewarded with his accepting nod. He returned to this place. She clicked her fingers.  
'Sorry. Thought I heard something.' she said, lowering her hand. Dean shot her a bemused scowl.  
'So, Lucifer?' he queried.  
Castiel jumped in. 'Perhaps there is an easier way. An Angelic way. I shall consult my brethren on this.' and he vanished.  
'Oh, ok.' Dean shrugged.  
'Cas will figure it out.' Sam said, to his dad.   
Temperance frowned at the floor, that strange feeling had gone, but she was sure, completely sure, that someone was watching her. She was sure in the way that a lifetime of killing and Hunting could make a person sure.   
'Drink, anyone?' she clapped her hands.   
'Tem its 9.30!'  
She found a bottle of vermouth, and started making a dirty martini with a cheap bottle of gin.  
'I don't believe in time anymore.' She meant it as a joke, but there was some truth to it.   
'And Gus was always half cut doing this job.'  
Dean rolled his eyes, turning towards his dad.  
She drank the cocktail without tasting it, glaring at the jar of olives on the counter. If she just didn't react, if she didn't look around or raise her suspicions, maybe that feeling of something stalking her would disappear. Or maybe enough martini's and she'd forget about it.

Dean watched his father go around on auto-pilot all morning and made a hasty retreat to the library to try and find something to help him.   
He needed to help him, he needed to fix this, he had gotten Temperance thrown into Hell to get his dad back, he wasn't going to sit still until one of them was happy again.   
Sam was combing through files and articles at his usual table, with a quiet frenzy. Dean was working his way through his own stack of books beside him, they had been at it for hours and Dean's eyes kept going out of focus over the old, dense, print in his book.  
He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing and pushing the book away.   
'What time is it?'  
'4pm.' Sam answered, still buried behind a wall of text.  
He left him to it and stretched his legs, halfway down the hall he heard the unmistakable strains of Led Zeppelin coming from the music room. Expecting to find Temperance a few bottles deep into her record collection he pushed open the door.

A wall of sound sailed through it, he felt it whoosh over his head. Temperance was drumming and his dad was playing the bass, John Constantine's bass, with gusto if not great skill.  
'Oh my god.' he rubbed his eyes, but the sight and sound remained the same.  
They finished, yelling and whooping, and Temperance threw a can of beer towards Dean.  
'Party time?' he asked, more than a little annoyed to see them three sheets to the wind when there was work to do. Temperance had been unhelpful about the immortality spell and she seemed to have convinced his dad to drink away his sorrows.   
John had always been a mean drunk, Dean kept his back to the wall and his eyes on the man as he moved into the room.   
'Your dad has awful taste in music.' Temperance said, she didn't slur, but spoke with a clarity only the drunk could manage.   
'You're just young and tasteless' John put a hand to his chest, looking wounded.  
'What have you got against good old Rock 'n' Roll?' Dean popped the tab on the can and sipped the fizz out of the way. He knew that he shouldn't start drinking, he was too worried to get drunk and too tired to handle Temperance and John being drunk. He bent down to poke through music notes that had been scattered around the drum kit.   
'Nothing is wrong with Classic Rock, but you know, variety is the spice of life and not everything has to be commercially successful to be good. And if i here fucking ACDC one more time in the fucking Impala I will loose it.' She beat out a rhythm, then picked up her own drink. She had stuck with the martinis by the looks of it.  
Only Temperance could make day drinking a fancy cocktail look that tacky, she stripped all the class away, knocking it back from a mug and digging her fingers in to reach the olives. He felt a smile working its way onto his face, felt something shift off his soul as his worry melted into the background.  
'Scoot over, let me try.' he had kinda wanted to try the drums since she had moved in.  
'You'll put them out of tune.' she wailed as he pushed her aside.  
'Will not!' he scoffed. How hard could it be to make noise, he wondered, picking up the sticks and aiming a smack at the symbol. She winced, stood behind him and gently directed his hands on the instrument. Her touch was light and careful on his arm. He took a better grip and tried again.  
'Its left handed.' she explained, tapping arrhythmically on his shoulder, for him to catch the pattern.  
John fiddled with the pegs on the bass, plucked something that might have been by Black Sabbath and set it back on the stand. 'You been playing long?' he asked Temperance.  
'Since I was a kid.' she gestured to the cello case and opened a beer.  
The case was a little battered, the fabric around the hard cover was frayed and scuffed and there was a few peeling stickers pressed here and there over it. Dean knew that instrument had survived a lot, it had survived her for a start.  
'Play me something.' Dean said, he decided that the drums weren't for him and sat down on the floor, opening another beer. John sat beside him, smiling. It felt kinds nice to hang out like this, his earlier annoyance had vanished as quickly as it had come.   
Drunk Temperance usually played a convincing sober person, but she had to shake her head and visibly psyche herself up when she picked up the bow. Dean counted the empty can's quickly and drank his down before popping another.   
'Got anything in mind?' she asked.  
'Bowie!' his dad hiccoughed.  
She cocked her head to the side, Dean followed the tumble of her dark hair. He knew how soft it was, knew how it moved under his hands. The last time he had heard her play Bowie, which had been the first time he had heard her play Bowie, had been when Amara was unmaking the world around them.  
She plucked on the strings, knocking against the body, then took up her bow once more. It was 'This is Not America.', it didn't sound half bad on the cello, but she stopped suddenly halfway through. A far away look in her eyes, something like pain that he, Dean, didn't want to see.   
'Aw, that was good!' John urged her, leaning forward. Dean tried not to roll his eyes at that, his dad never paid anyone a compliment, not unless he wanted something from them.   
'Its such a bummer though. Hold on, here's one for you old timers.' she fell into another tune.  
'Kashmir!' Dean raised his can and knocked it against his dads, they clapped along. Her hands moved in a flurry, never missing a note despite the bottle of gin she must have drank by that stage.   
'Need an orchestra for this.' she said, when she had finished.   
Dean followed her hands as she dusted them off, he knew that was a habit of hers, she only did it when she was embarrassed. Temperance had never been shy about playing music before, he wondered if it was because she didn't know his dad that well. A little spike of alarm made him worry, suddenly, what had they be doing before he came in. Had his dad been hitting on her, or had they been flirting. He fiddled with his beer can, wishing there was a paper label to rip off.   
With heroic effort he shifted his train of thought, trying to preserve that moment of joy he had felt while she had been playing the song. She was probably just nervous about John being immortal, about maybe having to bring the Cage up. He pushed it all to the back of his head.  
'Maybe this is what we should do?' he looked up, following Temperance as she sat down across from him.  
'Drink away our lives? Sure.'  
'No! Lets start a band and give up Hunting!'  
'I'm in, 100 percent!' she raised her face to him, in that way that made him feel like the only guy on earth.   
'Does Sam still play the guitar?' John asked.   
Dean had a vivid memory of taking Sam to music lessons when he was a kid. He had begged to go and drove the family insane with his practicing all hours of the day, he hadn't had the most musical of ears but he had really liked playing.  
'No, he gave up before going to college.' he shook his head.  
'Was he any use?' Temperance had opened a beer and seemed to be giving serious thought to the band idea, her head cocked to the side.  
'What would we be called?' John was crushing the empty cans between his hands.  
'The Hunters?' Dean joked.  
'The Men of Letters?'  
'Full Torso Apparition.' Temperance said with a serious look. It took Dean a moment to place the phrase.   
'Ghost Busters!' he laughed, raising his drink to toast her.  
'You're not the only pop-culture kid round here.' she winked cheerily and finished her drink in a long swallow.   
God, he had missed her, he had missed this. Not that they got to do this much before she got the Mark and shit went south. Her caustic sarcasm and dry humor had always enticed him, she made him want to crack a few jokes and smile. She knew how to get people to loosen up, when she wanted them to, he wondered if that was the Angel or the Demon in her, or maybe it was neither, or both.   
'Oh, what about Cyrus the Great?' she said, pulling him out of his head, once more.  
'Who the what?' John asked, his eyes were glassy, Dean wondered if he had been trying to drink to keep up with Temperance and couldn't help but wince at the thought of the hangover he was facing. She could drink Crowley under the table and that guy had magic and Demonic resources at his beck and call.   
'Cyrus the Great. He's one of those ancient history ones. Someone who changed the fate of the world, apparently. The king of kings.'  
'I feel like I should know more about him than I do.' Dean frowned, casting his mind about. Cyrus was the Achaemenid Empire guy, he had restored the Temples and let the Jews return to their land, he was in the bible somewhere. The name brought up some ideas but nothing solid. He thought on it for a while, drinking his beer, he could see what she meant about the dude changing the fate of the world, if he didn't restore all the Temples then Judaism might have died out, or been less influential on world events. Christianity might not have happened.   
He mulled that over while she talked John through the evolution of Disco music and why it was, in her opinion, the first wave of Punk.  
'Why are we called Cyrus the Great though?' Dean found himself asking, when John had stopped laughing.  
'Because you and your brother changed the course of the world, your dad too. You stopped a whole host of world ending events. If anyone gets to be King of Kings, its you.'  
He blushed, he felt it flame in his cheeks, he didn't know if she meant him, or had said you in the plural, but it was felt like a compliment. A genuine one.  
'Nah, lets be called something cool, like, Admiral Thunder Sex God.' he scoffed, pushing back the intimacy of that look from her dark eyes.  
She burst into a long loud laugh, throwing her head back and letting the sound out towards the ceiling. The urge to kiss her came suddenly and he almost acted on it, almost. His dad was somehow a lot less drunk beside him and was giving him a deep, knowing look, over the top of his beer. He was looking at him with pity.  
He flinched away, as if John had reached out and punched him. Was he that obvious, did everyone know how much he wanted her, maybe they were right to pity him. Its not like he had a chance, they had taken their shot and he had blown it. Trying to look at anything but the other two people in the room, his eyes landed, unhappily, on a tattered Patti Smith album. There was a photograph spilling out from it, one he knew, of her and Crowley. She was a kid in that picture, somewhere alone in the world.   
Crowley, he thought glumly. if that guy rose from the dead she'd be on him before he could shake off the Rigor mortis. Dean knew she wasn't over him, he knew it and he still kept up hope. He scowled, finished his drink and went to get dinner ready.  
It wasn't worth it, going down that road. He couldn't afford to think about this. He didn't need her as a girlfriend, he didn't need a girlfriend, he had gotten along fine by himself for a long time.   
He snorted, angrily, as he peeled potatoes over the sink, glaring at the waxy tubers as if they had done him some great personal wrong. Temperance didn't want him, she had kissed him, but she had been drunk, it hadn't been right. She was just kissing him because she knew that he wanted it.   
She took pity on him, just like everyone else did. Stupid Dean, all he was good for was killing monsters and hurting people. He slammed his fist down on the chopping board, the dull thud of his flesh hitting the wood didn't carry and pain began to swell in his palm. Why the hell did he ever make a move on her, why, she never gave him the slightest indication that she wanted him, why did he have to fuck himself over like this. Why!  
He damn near threw the casserole into the oven, slamming the door closed behind it. He opened a bottle of beer, cold from the fridge and held it in his aching hand. He had to let this go, he had to try and get something right. His dad needed him, he could do that, he would do that.

Castiel stayed away from them for a few days, Temperance knew it was to give her time to explain why she had him lie. The problem was she had nothing solid to go on, and she knew he wouldn't like her feeling of vague anxiety.   
She needed proof, so she needed a plan. She had to get god to trip up, and if that wasn't a monumental enough task she had to do it soon, before the brothers got suspicious.   
Temperance had an idea, an idea to see just how much Chuck was fucking around with them, but it wasn't going to a safe game to play. She had a feeling once she did this, everything would change, and open war with god himself was a stupid fucking gamble.  
It was a risk she wouldn't have been willing to take, if she hadn't had Amara in her head, if she didn't know just how much of a fuck-wit that this god could be. While she was still mulling it over, circumstances forced her hand.   
It was Dean, he was pushing to raise the Cage. He was making arguments that almost, but not quite, sounded just like him. He was acting out, he was getting outright mad at things that he would have normally let go, or left to fester, little bubbles of rage kept cracking through at the strangest of times. It wore her nerves to the quick, and left her on edge with her Grace and Vice at hand.   
What really worried her about the whole awful situation was that Sam didn't seem to notice the change in his brother. Those two were too in-sync for one not to notice the smallest of changes in the other. They were never blind to each other, never, and this was a big difference. She didn't know this Dean.  
Temperance took note of it all, without letting it show, she gathered it all in evidence and weighed it up, late at night, in her head where nothing else could see it. Until one morning the tension broke.  
'Why aint you doing anything to help?' Dean growled at her.  
'I am!'  
'Like what! You're supposed to be powerful and you're just sitting on your ass, in my house, drinking my beer!'  
Temperance was not true to her namesake in any sense, she didn't believe in moderation and she certainly didn't practice it. She was also the fucking Queen of fucking Hell.  
'I got him out of Hell, did you fucking forget!! And this house is kept stocked by my fucking bank accounts!' she was seething with anger, she wasn't the bigger person, she was never the bigger person.   
'I didn't forget!' he spat, advancing on her with a finger pointed at her face. 'But you seem to have forgotten what family means.'  
'Family, huh, your right, I killed mine I couldn't possibly know what you're on about!' she slapped his finger aside with a snarl.  
'Yeah you did.' he snapped, when he was angry he dropped his chin and his already deep voice lowered into a grumble. His eyes glazed over with unfathomable hatred. She had seen him look like that before, but it have never been turned on her, never.  
The words were spat at her feet, raw and violent. She had killed her family, not a good family, not a real family. The Winchesters were her real family. Maybe she had killed them too.  
'Don't point your fucking finger at me again Dean Winchester, I will tear it off.'  
He dropped his hands, curling them into fists. 'Are you gonna help or not? Are you going to raise the Cage?'  
'Bite me.' she heard the shift in her tone, flat, dead, and emotionless.  
'All you ever do is kill shit and complain. Well grow up Tem, you're an adult, so act like it. Help or get out!'  
Sam had come running at the raised voices and hurried to intervene. 'We're all on edge guys.' he said, soothingly.   
'No' she snapped, the thread holding her back had shorn off. She felt her eyes bloom to Demon black and was rearing to break something.   
'Dean clearly has something to say, so let him say it! Maybe he's realised all his daddy issues have to be dealt with now and its too hard for him, maybe he's realised that the world doesn't fucking revolve round him, maybe.'  
Smack, she heard it rather than felt it, Dean interrupted her tirade with a well aimed punch, right across her jaw and she, with her impeccable reflexes, had caught it with her arm. She was fast, she was powerful, no one got to smack her in the face anymore.   
Sam's mouth dropped open, Dean's did too, once the anger slipped off. He paled, his eyes widened in horror, he stumbled back against the sink.   
'I.' he choked on his words, trembling.   
'Go on, take another swing if it will make you feel better.' she said, eyes on his.  
Cain, thats who he reminded her of, Cain. Turning on her in an instant, ready to dole out punishment. Cain.   
'Tem.' he licked his lips, mouthing blankly. 'I'm.'  
'Save it.' she spat, turning on heel and marching out of the room.  
She unearthed her double bass pedal, slammed the music room door shut and worked her way through as much of Lamb of God's discography as she remembered. Which, as it turned out, was a hell of a lot. She didn't come out until late, and no one tried to disturb her.

That night she found Sam cleaning up the library, shifting books around with a heavy air hanging around his neck.  
'Hi.'  
'Tem.' he looked pained, she felt bad about that. 'Tem, he would never, he, Dean.'  
'Yeah I know, he's tense.' she flicked a wrist, begging him not to bring it up.  
'He.' Sam began again.  
'Fucking, don't Sam!'  
'Ok.' he cleared his throat, shuffling his feet along the floor boards.  
It had been running around her head as she drummed, she made an effort to appear very angry, hence the metal drumming, but really her head was off somewhere else. Castiel would agree with her, she was sure, something was making everyone act differently, something had been badly wedged in and it was most obvious with Dean. Dean Winchester, she knew, loved her, and she loved him, he wouldn't hit her over this shit. She had held him when he cried, she had pulled bullets and shrapnel out of his body and she had felt tried to prop him up when he was down. That meant something, that bond meant something that couldn't be quantified.   
All Temperance could do, right now, was test a horrible theory that she couldn't avoid any longer.   
Temperance sighed, picked up a few books and helped Sam put them away, most, she noticed, were on Demonology and Curses.   
'Did you find anything?' she asked.  
'Nothing new.' his voice hollow. He glanced at her, looking a little worried.'Would Constantine have any idea?  
'That man could get the Fates to polish his boots, he was a world class manipulator, but he got his immortality in his own way. He wouldn't have anything new to add to this.'  
Here they were again. Sam wasn't angling to raise Lucifer as much as Dean, but he had been asking about summoning Constantine at every opportunity. She considered that, yes, Constantine might know what to do, but something in her heart refused to bring him into this. He was dead, he was done, she wasn't going to risk his soul. She didn't want to put him on the board in her cold war against god.  
'I know Cas is looking into this, but, it just seems like this type of magic needs an expert. Immortality isn't something that Angels mess with, its more for Demons and Witches.' Sam continued.  
'Maybe Gus's Mam would know.' she half joked.  
'Crowley's mother?' Sam sounded incredulous.  
'Yeah, she's a Witch, still alive to the best of my knowledge. Or, she's not in Hell at any rate.'  
His brows contracted together and he shook his head, sending his hair flowing. 'I prefer to imagine Crowley springing fully formed from the ground.'  
'I'll talk to Papa Midnite about John. He was as close to immortal as you could get.'   
In her head she said, I'm lying to you, I'm not telling you everything, there is something bigger going on than this. She couldn't tell him the truth, she couldn't let him know that Castiel was not, in fact, working for them on this.   
'Dad's just, I don't know, he's not happy about living with this.' Sam tapped the spine of a book and sighed heavily.  
Castiel had felt the shift, she had that at least, she knew she hadn't imagined it. The shift, the tilt, she tried not to let the thoughts show on her face. That was what god had changed, he had made John immortal.   
Sam glanced at the title of a book in his hand and opened it, flicking through the table of contents, snapped the book shut and put it in its place.   
Temperance realised she was comparing them, building lists of pros and cons and instantly hated herself for it. Christ, what had happened to her, she watched Sam lovingly order his books, more content than he had been in years. She didn't want to rain down fire on him, not again, she didn't want Sam and Dean caught up in her bullshit. Dean already was, and he might never realise that Chuck had reached out and added something to him, or taken something away.  
They were in a stalemate, until she came up with something. They were unable to move forward until she played her hand. She watched him a moment longer, taking in the careful way he moved. Time to test her theory.  
'I shouldn't have come back.' she said, deliberately loud.   
'What!' Sam's head shot up, his big brown eyes wide.  
Round one, first shot fired. She shouldn't have come back and she wasn't sure how Castiel had talked her into it.   
'I think I'm a problem, now. I know that I am.'  
His lips worked, thoughts clearly spilling over and jostling for place on his tongue. He set down the remaining books, put his huge hands on her shoulders and pulled her to his arms.. He smelled clean, soap and detergent, his chest was solid under her cheek and she could feel his heart thumping against it.  
'Tem, you're my sister. You are my sister, in every way that counts. You don't have to be ok, you don't have to pretend to be ok. Don't leave again. Please.'  
She patted his back and gently broke free of his iron grip. 'I'm just worried about causing more problems, I'm worried about what's been done to your dad and I feel like its my fault, like it has something to do with me leaving Hell.'   
No earthquakes, no rumbles, no flickering lights. She knew he was listening though. She could feel god's ear pressed against them.  
Sam's face crumpled before he could control it. 'Don't say that! Don't, its not true.'  
Speaking it aloud seemed to make it real, it made it tangible. A sense of foreboding trembled down her spine, she could feel her Dad scowling at her from some place beyond existence. A memory of him, sudden and fresh, bloomed before her, and it said 'Temperance, if you give name to the thing it gains power and form.'. He had been telling her a horrific story about fairies when he had said that, she had been very young and the lesson had stuck. She spoke something she had been worried about, something too delicate to speak about and she knew that god had heard her. She had laid out bait and now she needed to see if Chuck would bite.   
He wanted her out of the way, in Hell or dead, that much was clear. He wanted her away from his heroes. She was giving him a new path to try and force her down, if it worked, if he bought it, Sam and Dean would be asking her to go back to Hell.   
It was a gamble, it was a risk. She waited for a bolt of lightening, for a crook to appear and drag her away, she blinked, it was all very ordinary, nothing seemed to have happened. She felt god stirring around her, though, and she felt afraid.  
'I'll call Papa, and ask him what he knows about immortality.' she decided, spinning around and leaving Sam to his books.

Dean was delivering folded laundry to their rooms, it was his week on that chore so for once things got separated by colour and everything came back from the wash looking better than when they had went in. He didn't understand why Sam was so bad at it.  
He left Temperance's stuff until last, he had been trying to stay away from her recently, trying to get his mind in a good place, he still hadn't apologised for fighting with her, for raising his hand against her. They had barely looked at each other since he had lost his cool.  
He knocked on the door and pushed it open.  
'Thanks.' Temperance received her pile of clothes and put them into a drawer. She was still wearing her Pjs, dark shorts and a big grey hoodie that had once been Sam's.  
'What are you doing?' He eyed the Blade in her hand. Maybe she had a lead on the spell, his hope flared, maybe she had a plan.  
'Calling Hell.' she explained, picking up a little glass soap dish and slicing through her wrist. She spilled her blood into the vessel, pinched the wound closed and said.   
'Papa?'  
The blood bubbled, frothing slightly, as a connection forged in her mind between herself and Papa Midnite, enthroned in Hell below.   
'Thats nasty.' Dean commented. She rolled her eyes at him, smirking.  
'Wimp.'  
He followed her movements, shamefaced, maybe they were ok again. Maybe she had forgiven him for, well, you know. Dean had been practicing an apology, in his head, he cleared his throat.  
'Listen, Tem.'  
'Shh.' she held out a hand for silence, her face bent down over the gory dish.   
She frowned, a deep, worried frown and Dean shifted, his hackles rising. It wasn't open to him, he couldn't hear whatever the dead dude was saying.   
'Well?'  
'He's not answering, he's there, but he wont speak.' she narrowed her eyes at the blood.  
'Is he in trouble?'  
'Not unless he wants to be.' she mused, peering down.  
'Should we visit?'  
'Might be the best course of action.' she agreed, putting the dish down, still intent on it.   
'Well, you wanna head down there blind, or see if he answers the blood dial?' he stooped to pick up her gold lighter, it had fallen out of her pocket as she leaned forward. He rubbed a thumb over the carvings on the metal, almost too faint to feel.   
'Tem?'  
She had frozen, as if caught in time. The absolute stillness drew his eye, she wasn't even breathing. Her dark eyes flashed golden, haloed with bloody light as she stared unrelentingly down into the blood.  
He whipped his gun from the waistband of his jeans, those were not her eyes. He knew those eyes, they belonged to a dead man.  
'Lucifer?' he spat.  
She frowned at him, her eyes glowed with hellfire. When she went Demon on him she got those black eye things, full of smoke and evil. This was much worse, she was wearing an Archangels eyes, Satan's eyes. He was afraid.   
'Tem what the hell is going on?' he growled at her.  
'Something, someone, is trying to get into my head.' She suddenly dashed the dish full of blood from the table, scattering the contents over the floor. Her jaw set, a scowl forming on her face.   
It must be her, that scowl was as much a signature as her deadpan smile and drug use.  
In an instant that scowl disappeared, it slipped away like water and she opened her lips drawing in a loud breath.  
'Tem, whats going on?' he felt his own panic rising to match hers, she flinched, as if in pain shaking her head. He grabbed her arm, shaking her, trying to get a response.   
Her lips were clenched shut, to a thin, bloodless line and she was sweating. Shit, when had he last seen her break a sweat. As he watched blood began to flow from her nose and drip steadily down her face, rolling in fat lines over her chin and down her throat to disappear into her collar.  
The lights in the room began to flicker, overhead a bulb burst, raining fine glass down on them, he pulled her aside quickly, covering her with his bulk as more and more lightbulbs blew up overhead.   
'Tem, please?' he looked around desperately, for something, anything to help.  
Light was flooding in from the hallway, in it she was pale and small, barely seeming to live.  
'Castiel.' she gasped, and at the word blood flecked spit flew from her mouth and hit his chest.   
'Cas!' he roared, pulling out his phone, praying with new urgency. A soft rush of air and the Angel, his friend, was there. He strode forward, put a hand on her shoulder and the two of them seemed to lock against each other, Castiel's face was a mask concerned of concentration.  
'She is being attacked.' Castiel spoke, around clenched teeth.  
'How? What do I do?' Dean begged, he had never felt this useless before, panic had his heart running in overdrive. He had been a piece of shit to her all week, he had been angry at her, ignoring her and it wasn't her fault. It was him, him. What the hell had he been thinking, why did he always do this, why did he push her away.  
'Something is trying to pull her back to Hell, she is resisting and I am letting her use my power. Get Sam, there is a ward. Go!'  
Dean ran for his brother, shouting his name until both him and John appeared, guns drawn at the end of the corridor. 'Get paint, Tem's room.' he barked at them.  
Neither Temperance nor Castiel had moved, Dean hurried back into the room, John and Sam following a moment later.  
Castiel laid his free hand on Sam's temple, showing him what he needed to do, and Sam got to work, John found a few hurricane lamps to help him.  
Dean had never seen a ward this complex. It wasn't Enochian, or, not all of it was. He thought he recognised some of the components and noted that his dad was taking it down in his journal. Sam completed it with a touch of his finger and a drop of his blood and the whole thing glowed around the pair. Castiel and Temperance were shimmering strangely inside it, like they were looking at them through a haze of heat.   
Temperance had somehow grown paler, her eyes were open, but she wasn't looking at anything. Those strange Devilish eyes were dull and lifeless for all the fire burning inside them. Her knees were sagging forward and it seemed Castiel was the only thing keeping her on her feet.  
John had taken Dean's arm and drawn him back, he pressed him into a chair.  
'Dean, breath, its gonna be ok.'  
He nodded, trying to find the words to reassure his dad and his brother, but he couldn't, it had all happened so fast, so suddenly. She was slumping in Castiel's arms, she was bloody and pale and looked like shit, the last time she had looked like that she'd been in his arms, right before she killed herself.   
'She said.' Sam rubbed a hand over his mouth and turned away from the ward.  
'What?' Dean pressed.  
'She said she was worried she was somehow causing things to go wrong, just by being out of Hell. Maybe she needs to be there, like theres a balance or something trying to draw her back?'  
'No, she, no.' Dean shook his head, no, they didn't want Temperance back in Hell. She was here for them, she was gonna help fix John and then they were all gonna take a goddamn road-trip to the seaside and eat a picnic and everything was going to be ok. She was staying, she was staying with them.  
'If thats true will find a way to deal with it.' John said, decisively. His sharp eyes on the Ward.   
Hours passed or days, or possibly no time at all. Time didn't seem to matter, all that mattered now, to Dean, were the two people in the Ward. He he took a steadying breath, his nerves fraying as the silence stretched.  
'Sam, what can we do, right now?'  
'I'll check the Bunker Wards, you gear up and come back here, all we can do is wait this one out, ok?'  
Dean hurried for his rock-salt shotgun, one of the Angel Blades and the Colt. Sam would handle the magic, he would handle the munitions. He could do that, he would do that.   
A wave of anger swooped through him, but he couldn't help, not really, firing a gun into the shadows wasn't going to fix whatever was going on. He passed the Colt to his father without a word.  
'Son, if we need to send her back.' he began.  
'No!' Scowling he sat back in his seat, the shotgun across his knees. All they could do, and he hated it, was to wait.   
It had to be close to midnight when Castiel gasped and he and Temperance broke apart. Dean and Sam jolted awake and hurried to their feet as Temperance tottered in the Ward then fell to her knees, slumping until her head touched the floor. The lines began to pulse fade, slowly turning back to red paint on the ground.  
'Fuck me.' she muttered, hoarsely.   
'Cas?' Sam took a tentative step forward.  
'Whats happening?' Dean heard the plea in his voice, he felt like he had barely blinked in the past few hours.  
Castiel lowered himself onto Temperance's bed, wincing. 'Shit, Cas, what do you need?'  
The Angel look rough, he moved stiffly as if he was in pain.  
'I need to rest, I am weakened.' he put his hand to his chest, as if to ease a pain.   
'It was Papa, Papa Midnite. That mother fucker.' Temperance had shifted to a crouch and slowly pushed herself up to stand. Her voice was husky, like she had been shouting for a length of time. Dean looked at her, helplessly.  
John crouched nearby, not touching the marks on the floor, his eyes on her, like she was a dangerous puzzle to sort out.   
'He tried to recall her to Hell, to bind her there.' Castiel explained, blinking up at Dean.  
Temperance was wiping her face with her sleeve and smearing blood across her chin. Dean saw the sleeve of Sam's hoodie darken with the volume of it. She looked furious.  
'He's not that strong.' she said, meeting his gaze, understanding flashing between them. Someone was helping Midnite, someone with real power.  
Dean nodded, looked to his brother.   
'Lucifer?' Sam asked, with trepidation in his tone.  
'No, its God.' said Castiel, shuddering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Howdy do, many thanks for the kudos. Comments, queries and mean laughter of the 'ha ha' variety are all welcome. :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...'You are not more powerful than the Creator, Temperance.' he lectured.  
> 'I know I'm not all powerful, don't worry, I haven't developed a fucking complex.' she sat down heavily on a rock and Castiel joined her, she felt his wings nudging against her side, if she squinted she could see them there, all around him.  
> 'So, why have you brought me to a place that God cannot see, if not to speak about vanquishing him?' he shuddered lightly at the thought.  
> A wind had picked up, just a light breeze, that brought up sand and thin dirt into the air. She could smell the heat of the soil around her and suddenly wanted a drink....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

Temperance's eyes didn't turn back to grey for an hour at least. She stumbled to the shower, leaving Castiel on her bed and a mess on the floor.  
Dean mopped up the blood and paint, careful not to disturb the Angel, a mantra running through his head as he scrubbed. Someone was trying to hurt her, something was trying to hurt her.   
She had changed, he had made her change, he had let her get caught up in his fight and she had paid of it. It was strange to admit, but he had almost gotten used to her black eyes, and now they were gone. Another part of her had died on his watch, she was being chipped away and he couldn't help.  
He had gotten so mad at her the other day, he had felt like he hated her, for not loving him enough, for not raising Lucifer from where-ever the Cage was. He looked back on that now with sober clarity and he judged himself, harshly.  
Of course they shouldn't raise Satan, goddamn it, they had spent enough life and blood locking him away. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't reconcile himself with the man who had been so desperate to get his father out of Hell that he had sold someone, that he had sworn to treat like a sister, down the metaphorical river. What the hell kind of person did that make him.   
He dumped the dirty water out and put away the mop, scowling at his fists. It was like someone had dropped something over his head, like his eyes and ears had been all messed up and now he was seeing straight, now he could hear what was going on. Something was wrong, there was a bad smell to all of this. His dad had been fine, until suddenly he hadn't been, he, Dean, had been happy to have Temperance back until suddenly he hadn't been and now Sam, who constantly defended the fact that family came first was ready to send Temperance back to Hell.  
He went to his room, took out all his weapons and began to clean them, then he looked through his magical med-kit, checked his journal, made his goddamn bed as if his dad was gonna come in about bounce a quarter off of it and then just sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands.  
He needed to talk to someone, maybe Castiel, he needed to check if he was going crazy or not. 

Temperance was looking down, once more, at her bloodstained hands and trying to work out what had gone wrong. At least it was just her own blood, this time, she reasoned, scrubbing her hands in the chipped bathroom sink. She flinched from her new eyes in the mirror, they were Lucifer's eyes in her exhausted face.  
Papa Midnite had gone to the enemy, he had taken her Throne with Chuck's backing, she knew that now. Chuck didn't want her in Hell to rule, he wanted her dead. Hell was closed to her, but it was still a part of her, she could still feel her power flowing from it and knew she still, technically at least, owned the place. She wondered if god knew that and decided to keep it quiet, for now.   
She carved Castiel's ward into her arm, where once she had warded herself from Cain, and made a mental note to stay away from magic, and crucifixes, just to be on the safe side. She had a better idea of what god wanted now, which was good, but she had paid dearly for the knowledge. There was a tremor in her limbs that she couldn't quite shake and a pain where her soul should be. That wound felt mortal, she probed around it with her Grace, trying to knit the edge together, but she was exhausted, far too exhausted to try.   
Sam flat out refused to believe that god had meant to hurt her, he pleased with Castiel and with Temperance, saying there had to be a mistake, that there had to be something they didn't know. She recognised the panic in his eyes, as order broke down around him and lied, lies were coming very easily to her these days.  
'We don't have all the facts, lets just, lets keep an open mind.' she said, even hitching on a smile to reassure him with. She had brought this down on them, she was hurting them, needlessly.   
Dean hadn't spoken much after Castiel had saved her, there was a dark look in his face as he left her room and he kept to himself after that. She lasted one more day in that fraught atmosphere before she decided she needed some air.  
She convinced John to give back her car keys, with the promise that halfway decent whiskey could be found at a superstore a few towns over, and brought Sam on a supply run, to calm his nerves and to check where his head was.  
'How do you feel?' he asked, as she was parking in the massive lot.  
'Better, thanks.'  
'I meant, like, how are you feeling about what we talked about before. About you feeling like you were causing trouble being on Earth?'  
She didn't have an answer for him, she didn't know if the Winchesters had discussed this amongst themselves or if it was the first time he had chosen to pursue the topic again.   
'We're here for you,you know that.' he pressed, when she remained silent.  
'Yeah I know.' she winked at him from across the car.  
'But?'  
'But, I'm not who I was, Sam. I'm something else and we can't pretend otherwise.'  
'You're the Queen of Hell, but, you've always been part Demon. You've always had power. Do you really think its just taking the Throne that is causing all, well, this?' he gestured to encapsulate the quiet car-park. She knew what he meant and sighed, heavily.   
Round two, was it round two. She thought god might have won the first one and she didn't know if she was ready for this. If Chuck was influencing them, then she would say her piece and Sam would press her about returning to Hell. If Chuck wasn't then she was batshit crazy and she needed to get Papa Midnite off her Throne before he did any damage.  
The spring morning was crisp and bright, a smell of rain that had fallen during the night was rolling in on the breeze. It reminded her of Ireland, she hadn't been back since she left with her band, broke, broken and toting a cello.  
'Sam, for a very long time I was my dads daughter and I was pretending to be human. I did it so well that I fooled myself, almost, but I've been changing since before I took the Mark. My mind has been changing, I mean.'  
'Uh, I don't think I get you.' he shot her a concerned look as they set off towards the big grocery store.   
'I was, like really fucking depressed. I hated myself and I thought that was all just the usual mixed bag of getting dumped, childhood trauma and my life generally going nowhere.'  
'Well, yeah, all that must have built up on you. You had problems and I didn't really see them at first. It took me a while to realise you needed help too.' that was Sam's usual brand of concern, he was nice and she hated what she was doing.  
She cut him off, kindly, shaking her head and pressing a hand to the crook of his elbow. He wanted to understand, he wanted to show that he was there for her and he loved her and her heart sang for the man, but this wasn't what this conversation was about.  
'I wasn't just depressed, I was going through a transformation that put my mind at war with itself. I had been using a human brain, with human processes and all that. I had been existing in a way that I wasn't built for and as I grew, as I began to understand my power, I tried to stop it. I tired not to change and it made everything harder.' she broke off to pick a trolley from the rack as they walked under a blast of conditioned air at the store front.  
She reflected that this was a strange place to have this conversation and idled before a display of Easter chocolate.  
'Let me push the cart.' Sam insisted, steering them towards the vegetable aisle. He was waiting for her to gather her thoughts, he was very considerate like that.  
'I resisted being who I was until I didn't have a choice anymore. When I died that first time I really did die. My body died, I've been possessing it ever since, its dead.' she pinched her arm for emphasis. 'What I am trying to say is, that girl who moved in with you, I'm not her, not anymore. I'm something Other, with a capital O.'  
'Its hard not to think of you as human.' Sam said in a low voice and she knew, in a beautiful rush, that he understood her, but that didn't matter right now  
'Yeah.' she picked up a box of biscuits and slid them in under the cabbages.   
'But?' he pressed.  
'But I'm not human Sam, maybe I belong in Hell. Maybe I can do some good down there. Maybe that is whats best for everyone?'  
His face was a mask of concern and they finished the shopping trip without saying anything else, as he loaded the bags into the car he said, in a small, painful voice.  
'Dean won't want you to go. It will hurt him.'  
Round two, points to Temperance, Sam had let her go, she wasn't family in his mind, not any longer. Chuck was changing his hardwiring.  
Strangely, she felt a little lighter as they left, with bags of food and household supplies packed into the boot like Tetris blocks.   
On the drive home they startled a deer, a doe with its fawn. The uncoordinated baby ambled confusedly after its mother, disappearing between the trees. It was April, it was Spring, there was new life flourishing all around them and Temperance was gearing up for war.

Sam had spoken with his father and clearly his father had spoken with Dean, because Dean wasted no time in grabbing her by the arm, shoving her into a wall and screaming at her.  
'You belong here!' he roared, she swore she saw a capillary burst in his eye.  
'Dean.'  
'No! Listen to me, I aint letting you go back to Hell. I'm not going to let you throw your life away, so what if God says so! You're family. You're one of us!'  
Strange, she wasn't expecting that, she was expecting resignation. With some concern she wondered if she had gotten everything arse-ways. Her instincts had never been that wrong before and she was raised to live on them. No, she was right. She knew that she was right.  
'Thank you.' she said, meaning it. For whatever reason Dean wasn't getting another re-write, or maybe Chuck couldn't use him, maybe she had her hooks in Dean too deeply, maybe Dean knew himself too well to be shaken from his path. More than likely, the man was too stubborn to give in. He had made a declaration, in her favour, and she was petrified about what that might mean.   
He dropped her, flushing with embarrassment 'I'm sorry.'  
'I know, me too.' She dropped that pain away, letting it go 'Hows your hand?'  
'Still sore.' he mumbled.  
'See, my face probably would have broken it, I was doing you a favour.'  
He winced at that, she agreed that it wasn't the time to joke about it.   
The tension was back in the air again, John and Sam were both looking at her with a new suspicion in their gaze. Their eyes identical, brown and mistrustful. Castiel had been in and out of the Bunker, like a Yo-Yo, he never stayed long, but always tried to speak with her. Sam usually interrupted, she tried to stay charitable in her thoughts, reminding herself that it wasn't him, not really, but after the fourth broken sentence she started feeling angry.  
Demon-eyed angry. She realised, with revulsion, she was close to snapping her fingers and doing something to him and had to pinch down on her arms to stop the urge to do magic. That wasn't her, shit, she felt like Lucifer was under her skin, poisoning her. She had to work to let her eyes return to grey and stop being the Devil.  
Temperance needed to speak to Castiel in private, sooner rather than later, and she wracked her brains for a place to go. It was the Map table that gave her an idea, its lights had been dim recently, but there were one or two areas that were always dark. Soft Places.  
There was a Soft Place in Arizona and she was almost certain that Chuck would have to standing beside her to really see her there. The Soft Places were weird like that, they existed and didn't exist at the same time, its where their power came from, they didn't believe in themselves and they were certain about that.

The sun was beating down on the barren hill, at exactly midday, when the shadows where small under her feet, there was a rushing of great wings.  
'Thanks for coming.' she hugged him, for once, and he seemed to enjoy it.  
'I have no new knowledge about Papa Midnite, it seems that Hell is closed off to anyone who wishes to enter and there are no Demons coming out.'  
'The Gate is still open, I'd know if it wasn't.' she assured him.  
'Can you return?'  
'I'm fucking barred, and I don't mean someone will see me and kick me out, I am not able to get in to Hell. I'm still connected to it but the door is fucking shut on me too.' She aimed a kick at a rock and watched it skitter down the slope.  
'Sister, what can we do? We are powerless in the face of the unknown. I think you should tell the brothers of your suspicions.'  
'No, we can't. He, Chuck, must be onto me by now. I don't think he can do anything about it, yet, but he will make another move soon. He's already had Sam drop the 'Raising the Cage' plan and focus on getting me back into Hell'  
'On to you?' he asked, curiously, tipping his head to the side.  
'He must know that he can't influence me, the way he can everyone else. He must know that I'm planning something.'  
'And what exactly are you planning, Temperance? You must confide in me otherwise I cannot assist you.' His tone was stern now.  
'On beating him at his own game. He wants me gone, well fuck him. I do what I fucking want and I want to stay right here. He's trying to get rid of me, so he can send the Winchesters on their merry way to another apocalypse.'  
'You are not more powerful than the Creator, Temperance.' he lectured.  
'I know I'm not all powerful, don't worry I haven't developed a fucking complex.' she sat down heavily on a rock and Castiel joined her, she felt his wings nudging against her, if she squinted she could see them there, all around him.   
'So, why have you brought me to a place that God cannot see, if not to speak about vanquishing him?' he shuddered lightly at the thought.  
A wind had picked up, just a light breeze, that brought up sand and thin dirt into the air. She could smell the heat of the soil around her and suddenly wanted a drink.   
'He's changing them, can you see it?' she needed Castiel to have noticed, but she knew, as soon as the words left her lips, that he couldn't.   
He was too woven into their story to see behind it. She hung her head in defeat. Another route she couldn't take. Chuck was really narrowing her options, she was going to have to do this alone, as much as she thought Dean might be safe, there was the possibility it was all part of some scheme to lull her into a false sense of security. She fucking hated this, she wasn't made for this nonsense.  
'I think the strain of your recent ordeal has.'  
'Don't!' she cut him off sharply. 'Don't sit there and tell me I'm being hysterical, or paranoid, or whatever. You felt the tilt, you believed me when I said something was wrong, when Dean first asked to raise the Cage. What changed?'  
'Nothing has changed, Temperance. I trust you, I believe that you are worried, but I cannot go against my Creator.'  
She just didn't know how to explain it, a crushing sense of loneliness hit her, centre mass, and she leaned into his side. He put his arm around her, she noted that he had gotten much better at acting human. Sometimes Castiel would parrot Dean's actions, sometimes he had reactions that were all his own, he had learned a lot in the years he had spent on Earth.  
Perhaps that was a way to make him see, then.  
'You love Dean.' she said, slowly.   
'We share a profound bond.' he nodded above her.   
'You love him.' she pressed.  
'Yes.'  
'Do you believe that I am still capable of love?'  
There was a pause, no more than a fraction of a second. She sucked in a breath, waiting for him to strike a blow. If he didn't think she was still capable of human feelings then there might not be a way around this. Love was all she had, in the end.  
'Yes.' he answered, firmly, giving her arm a little squeeze.  
She let out a breath she had been holding, a small mercy that he didn't think she was a complete monster, not yet.  
'Thank you. So, can you believe that I am acting out of love, for Sam and Dean?' A little voice in the back of her head, which sounded very much like Crowley was scoffing, but she ignored it.  
'I believe that you believe you are acting in their best interest.' he said, delicately, avoiding the question.  
She laughed, harshly and sat up straight. He was too locked into his story, Castiel couldn't support her in this.   
'Chuck's making me the fucking villain, christ on a bike, Gus would love this.'  
'Temperance, please, God loves you. God loves us all. You feel he is against you, but he has a plan for us.'  
'Don't be so fucking basic Castiel, he loves himself and no one else. He's an artist, artists are liars. He wrote the play and you are all acting it out!' she pushed his arm away and tucked her hands between her knees, holding herself in.  
'As are you.' he tired to soothe her.  
'No, I'm not, it doesn't work on me anymore. Maybe it never did, he keeps trying to write me in and out but I can see it and it wont stick.'  
He didn't speak for a while, and when he did he put his arm back around her. 'You must feel very alone, Sister.'  
She nodded glumly and let him pull her close once more. He was an Angel, being in his presence was relaxing and she wanted to feel something. She wanted to feel secure, she wanted to feel like she wasn't drifting aimlessly through the world, never really touching it. She wanted someone else to see what a dick god was and how bad he was for her Universe.  
'If Crowley were here, would you feel like this?' he asked, gently.   
'I don't know.' she wondered, if Chuck had written it so that he didn't die, would she be fighting against destiny so much. A little flicker of revulsion in her gut made her shudder, Chuck had made Crowley, she had loved him, but he had been a puppet, just like they all were, just toys in gods dollhouse.  
'Sister, do you want Crowley back in your life?'  
Honest answer, she thought, yes, I do, but she shrugged in place of words, it didn't matter what she wanted. He was dead, he wasn't real, he was gone. Castiel covered her hand with his own.  
'Would that make you happy?' he pressed  
'How can I know?' she felt a little grumpy and sat up straight, but didn't release his hand.  
'If you were happy, with Crowley, it stands to reason you would be happy again if he was back.'  
'He's dead Castiel, Gus died a few hundred years ago, it just took a while for the rest of him to catch up.' she tugged on her pendant, its sharp edge pressing into her palm.  
'If you could get him back.' he began again.  
'No, stop it, we're not talking about this.' she stood up and marched to the cliff edge before spinning back. A prickle of trepidation in her nervous core.  
'Why are you talking about this?' she asked, suspiciously.  
He stood up, hands outstretched, as if he was pleading with her.  
'Temperance. Please, tell me, honestly, if Crowley was alive would you be with the Winchesters. I need to know?'  
Was this another story, another re-write, had Chuck put a new piece on the board.  
'No.' she dropped her eyes. She'd be in bed with Crowley, if he was alive, she would be with him somewhere new. She'd be in Iceland wrapped around his cock and she wouldn't be here feeling ashamed about that. She wouldn't be trying to keep up with some game of cosmic cat and mouse. Crowley was dead, wishing didn't change that, he was dead and she had said her goodbyes, she had left him behind her.  
'That is all I wanted to know.'  
There was something unsettling about his voice, she glanced up sharply, but he was grinning a flash of bone white teeth and then something was pulling her. There was a hook under her skin and it yanked her backwards, over the edge.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...She slid down the bench, making room for Dean. 'We need to kill god.'  
> The conversation stopped, Dean froze, with his spatula in midair.  
> 'Say that again.' his voice strangled.  
> 'You heard me......
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

The world around her lurched, the light changing, greying and dimming. She felt movement all around her, like she was being tugged through a gale and when it stopped, she was standing in the kitchen in the Bunker, clutching the counter and gasping for breath. The world tasted wrong around her.  
'Mother fucker!' she spat, her ears popping. She tapped down her pockets, no phone. Shit. How did she get here.   
'Who the bloody hell are you?'  
That voice, that impossible voice. That dead, beloved voice. No. No. No. Her body seemed to slow, her brain refused to make connections and she stopped thinking, because this wasn't real. This had to be a dream. She took a deep breath, damp, coffee, that horrible Horace & Horace aftershave. She hadn't smelled that in a while, spice and cedar-wood. She clapped a hand over her face, she didn't want to smell that, no. No.  
'Oh, Hell has nothing to do with it.' She spoke through gritted teeth and told her body to relax.  
It was the same room, the same kitchen. She looked at the mug tree, all plain white and familiar. The bottle of Bullet Rye Bourbon on the table, the dent in the door of the fridge. She couldn't turn around, she couldn't face that voice or the body it belonged to. This wasn't real.  
'What the fuck?' A new voice spoke from the door, boots hit the floor as he crossed over to her. The man clapped a hand on her shoulder and spun her round, he had a knife to her throat and she let him pin her to the wall. The light fell on his face, on his angry scowl.  
'Dean.'  
His eyes were clear, lined and burning angrily. A scar she didn't know slanted over his cheek. his voice was lower, more of a rumble, older. She looked passed him, her eyes drawn to the table, to the impossible still life, suit, tie, cut crystal.  
'Hi Gus.'   
It was an irresistible magnetic pull, she needed to look at him, even if she didn't fucking want to. She let herself be pinned to the wall and just drank him in, completely ignoring the large, angry Hunter.   
Crowley's eyes glittered with amusement, his lips pulled into a charming grin. No, this wasn't him, it had to be some magic bullshit. This is a fucking trick, a lie. He's dead, she saw him die, she fucking killed him.  
'Gus?' he raised an eyebrow, flowing closer. He pulled a knife from his inner jacket pocket and tested the tip, in an indifferent sort of way, on his thumb.  
'I don't believe we have had the pleasure of being introduced. I'm Crowley, King of Hell.'  
She felt him delving through her, looking for something, she wondered what he could find.  
'I'm Temperance, Queen of Hell, scabby punk, half Demon and half Angel and Fergus MacLeod was my best friend.'   
She raised her fingers to click, to get Dean to move away, but the empty echo of her finger striking her palm did nothing. It was just a click. Both his and Crowley's eyes narrowed even more at that, zeroing in on her empty hand.  
'Shit.'  
There was nothing, nothing where her power should be, a vast, empty, velvet nothing that was something more than nothing. Fuck. To cover her confusion she shoved Dean away, hard enough that he hit the counter. Her Dean, the real Dean, had taught her that particular move years ago, when he was gearing her up to kill Cain.   
'What are you?' he snarled, gun in is right hand, knife in his left. Dean, he moved right, he had the same reaction, he was just like Dean. Almost. Dean had never looked at her like this, Dean had never looked so mean or so broken. She quickly smacked the barrel of the gun down.  
'Human at the moment, I think. I shouldn't be, I really fucking shouldn't be.'  
'How do you know me, us, who taught you that break?' he shook her off and cocked the pistol.  
'You did, Crowley introduced us, I live with you. We're mates, family. My name is Temperance.' she reeled off, slapping on a winning smile and putting her hands up, where he could see them. Play nice, this wasn't a dream, it was a whole new world.   
'You're, what, a hunter?' his voice low and dangerous, his finger ready at the trigger.  
'Sort of. I think I might be in the wrong Universe.'  
'The wrong Universe?' Crowley repeated, one brow raised.   
Dean moved aside for him, she was curious to note that there was a level of trust between these two. Trust that had not existed in her own world, both of them happy to show each other their backs, both of them in a room alone together. She wondered what had caused that to happen.  
Crowley pointed at a chair .'Sit, darling, and start talking.'   
Why the hell did that word make her weak at the knees. Darling, it had never meant much before, but it had been so long since she had heard it. Darling, she was his darling, she had always been his darling. She wanted to cry, she wanted to look away, she needed to get out of here. Wherever the hell 'here' was.   
She walked over to the offered seat and curled her hands around the base to check the underside, she was a little amused to find a Devils Trap inscribed on it. She sat, cautiously but no magic wove around her and nothing began to hurt. Whatever she was in this place, she wasn't a Demon.  
Crowley soothed his tie and took a seat across from her, while Dean remained on his feet, scowling down at her. This Dean couldn't have been older, but he looked it, there was an air about him that spoke of years that couldn't have passed. His hair wasn't frosted with grey and his body was still muscled, but he looked old. She wondered, idly, what Sam looked like here.   
The men looked at her, she looked back. There was nothing she could say to get ether of them to trust her, she knew that, but she might need them to send her home, or help send her home.  
She looked at Dean, wrenching her gaze from Crowley. Dean would be easier.  
'I know you and Sam, in my world.'  
He was looking at her, examining, measuring and weighing. It stuck her then that this Dean seemed much more like his father. He hadn't lowered his gun, it was aimed at her head with an almost casual air.  
'He's dead.'  
She took a slow breath, well, that explained why Dean looked like shit. 'Oh. I see'  
'Listen lady I don't know how you got here but you're going now, either out the door or into the furnace.'  
That might actually kill her, at the moment, was that Chucks plan all along. Get her guard down, send her to one of the other Universes where she didn't exist, bind her up so she was human, or mortal, at least.  
'Busty Asian Babes 69.' she said, cutting him off as he started a new threat. She knew that password, it had been an easy one to crack.  
He froze, mouth agape. Same kissable lips. 'How did you?”  
'Know your shit computer password? Easy, its you're two favourite things you fucking juvenile.'  
Crowley snorted a little laugh and she turned back to look at him, she couldn't help it, her hand reached out, treacherous fingers hovering close before she got a hold on herself. 'You're not my Gus, I know that, and he's not my Dean. This ain't my universe and I'm not here to cause trouble, I just need to get home.'  
'Ah yes, another Universe, one where you're a Queen of Hell and we are bosom chums?' Crowley spoke lightly, though the smile was gone from his face.   
She shrugged, eloquently. 'You don't have to believe me.'  
'And why did you come visit our little world then, your Highness?'  
'I think god sent me here because he' annoyed with me.'  
'Oh, you know the man in change then?' He tapped the tabletop with his knife, his eyes still searching, magic still rooting around inside her.   
'Crowley, please tell me I am imagining this. That chick did not say she knows God?' Dean screwed his eyes shut, shaking his head.  
'Alas Squirrel, I think it might be real.' Crowley's teeth glinted as he sneered, she felt his power wrap around her, holding her down. Chains appeared around her wrists and ankles, binding her swiftly to her seat.  
She managed a little snort, rolling her eyes. 'Kinky.'  
'You are not exactly human, but you're not half anything. You've no power to speak of, maybe a little sprinkling of Witchcraft here and there, but nothing to fret over.'   
'Witchcraft? I'm shit at magic.' she retorted, she couldn't really focus on her body right then, she couldn't feel any magic in her core, but the stuff coming in waves of Crowley.   
'That magic you're sensing, can you feel the residue of a spell that sent me here?'  
'Don't talk to her Crowley, I don't trust this.' Dean snapped, he had pulled a towel from a drawer and was about to bind it over her lips when Crowley held up a hand to stop him.  
'Why would someone send you here, to us?'  
'Not someone, god, as in the big cheese. The father, the almighty, that god.'  
'Well, if God wants you here, he should step in and stop me killing you.' Dean reasoned, pulling out his knife and putting it to her throat. With terrible slowness it tore through a layer of her skin, but didn't nick the jugular, wet blood trickled down over the metal, while his dead eyes bored holes into hers.   
This wasn't going well.  
'I don't really think he likes me that much.' she flashed him a smile with more confidence than she could muster.  
'He won't mind then.' the knife went deeper, millimetre by millimetre. She didn't blink, didn't flinch from the sting.   
A sudden stroke of inspiration seemed to paint this new world wth more clarity. She didn't exist here, it was like the Apocalypse world, she, Temperance, didn't have a place in this story. Which meant she could get out of it.  
'Kill me if you want. Kill me if you can.'  
Crowley gently pulled Dean back, they shared a look she couldn't decipher and, rolling his eyes, he sat down.  
'Ok, so, she's not scared of dying.' he said.   
'Its the most fun a gal can have with her clothes on.' Temperance watched his face shift, he packed away his threats and looked 40 years older.  
Crowley's sneer suddenly moulded into a toothy smile, a predatory smile. She looked into his eyes, his living eyes, lingered a moment on the curve of his lips. He was enjoying this, he was having fun, and she couldn't help but smile back.  
'Lets entertain the ridiculous notion that I believe you. If the man upstairs did indeed put you here, then maybe you're supposed to be here, maybe you're here to help us.'  
'I doubt it, I'm pretty sure he was just screwing with me. He sent me to a place where you are alive, that must be to annoy me.'  
'You know us, in another Universe?' he crossed his legs, examining his fingernails as if nothing she could say could possibly be as interesting as the pale half-moon of his cuticles.   
Bastard, she thought, fondly, as she snorted a laugh. This version of Crowley wasn't that different at all.   
'I live with Dean, Sam and, more recently, John Winchester. Here in this Men of Letters Bunker. Theres a secret dungeon and the plumbing isn't that great. A few years ago Sam tried to raise Satan from his Cage and that set off a whole series of shit events that cumulated in your father, Dean, getting trapped in Hell and a load of nonsense involving Angels and Demons and Prophets which is where I came in. I'm half and half, I helped you out and we managed to get your dad out of Hell and Lucifer back in the cage. However, along the way, you, Gus, died. You made me kill you and it broke my heart. Since then gods been on my shit list.' she took a breath, waiting.  
Dean broke the stretching silence. 'You said, Sam. Is he? He's alive, where you're from?'  
'Yes.' She watched the emotions play over his face. What was Dean without Sam, she didn't want to think about it, it was too wrong to consider. It was unnatural to have one and not the other.   
'We had to close the Cage. We had too.' Dean's voice almost broke, the burning pain of his eyes should have sliced her in half, she knew what it was about him now, it wasn't that he looked older. He was tormented.   
'He did the same thing in our world. Your Dad stepped in, instead. Sam didn't get trapped in the Cage.' she wondered if this Dean had all the same problems that her Dean had, on top of loosing Sam. Poor fucker.  
'Dad did that?' Dean shuddered, pressing his hands to his eyes. He shook his head tapped Crowley's shoulder and they both marched out the door, where, by the sounds of it, Dean swiftly began interrogating, and cussing out, the Demon.   
She looked at the chains, put a hand to her hair and pulled out a pin. It was just a lock, it didn't stand a chance against her. She coiled the metal on the table top and flicked on the coffee pot. They didn't have a kettle in this world, or any teabags, she decided to slum it with Maxwell house while they argued.   
Temperance couldn't sense anything about this Universe, she was removed from the cogs and wheels that set it in motion. So she was at a loss for how to proceed. Amara had gotten her out of the Apocalypse world, but Amara wasn't here, she was outside Chuck's creation. Hopefully having a good time, Temperance added to herself.   
Temperance didn't have any power to open a gate, she certainly didn't know any ancient spells that might rip up reality for long enough for her to get home. What she did have, she realised, as she poured coffee for herself, was a pounding headache and a packet of spearmints.   
Round three, first points to god. 

When they returned her eyes darted hungrily to Crowley, taking him in, a whole new memory that she didn't have before. He was incredibly still under her gaze, she wanted to drink him in while she could. Even if he wasn't her Crowley, even if she didn't know this one at all, he looked right, he smelled right, part of her was desperate to know if he tasted right.  
'You're out of sugar.' she said to Dean, pointing with her mug.   
Crowley clicked his fingers, a little dish of sugar cubes with a silver tongs appeared at her side.  
'Thanks.'  
Where did that tie come from, it wasn't his usual parachute silk it was woollen and narrow. She had never seen that tie before, but the suit was familiar. Clearly his tailor existed in this world too. She clutched her pendant, under her shirt, and let her mind wander. This Crowley didn't know her when he was human, so he probably wasn't as nice as hers had been. Not that her Crowley was particularly nice by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe his whole life had been different, maybe his death had been different. What would he have sold his soul for, here, if not for the memory of her.   
He sat across from her, uncomfortably and vanished the empty chains with a flick of his wrist. 'Stop that' he demanded, finding her eyes on him again.  
'Stop what?' she asked, sipping her coffee. It tasted like muck, even with the sugar.   
'Looking at me like I'm Father fucking Christmas.' he scowled and poured himself a drink, which she quickly stole from his hands.  
'Can't help it, my Gus has been dead a while.' The whiskey was the same, it almost brought a tear to her eye, not because of the godawful taste, for once. Dean was looking at her with a frown on his face and at length he spoke.  
'Crowley says your human, you aint that much of a threat.'  
'I can beat you to a pulp even if I'm human, love.' she raised an eyebrow. She was confident of that, Dean and her were well matched for a brawl, she might loose an eye but she'd beat him down.  
He breathed out heavily through his nose, he glanced at Crowley, before continuing. 'You think God sent you here?'  
'Yes. He got me to make a wish, and I ended up here.'  
'A wish?' Dean's face morphed to a troubled look and she latched onto that.  
'What were you two up to when I appeared?'  
'Trying to find my Dad, he's been MIA for years, theres been no sign of him.' Dean spoke in a measured tone but his hand around his coffee cup shook slightly.  
'With magic?' she pressed.   
'A pearl, plucked form the ocean on a dark moon, family blood and a hefty bit of power.' Crowley sniffed, straightening his tie and recapturing her attention.  
'We were doing it, Dean was doing it, when you appeared. So why did we get you and not daddy Winchester?'   
A wishing stone, she didn't think they really existed. John Constantine had spoken, at length, on them. He had tried to find one to wish away lung cancer, but went down the soul selling route instead.   
Was there a John in this world, a Mage who could tamper with the fabric of reality for the low price of a packet of silk cuts and the chance to look important. That was a road she didn't want to go down, she shook her head, to clear the thought.  
'The pearl is a wishing stone. I'm going to go ahead and guess that it reads the heart of the first person who touches it.' she looked up at Crowley, who had his practiced bland smile in place.  
'I might have been the one who found it.' he admitted, as Dean shook his head and went to the fridge. He took out a bottle of beer, it looked like Sam Adams, and opened it on the side of the counter.  
'Thought as much.'   
If the stone had a wish on it before the spell was cast it would revert to that wish. It could be anything, you could find it and really need to piss and accidentally wish yourself to a nice bathroom. It was curious though, that Chuck had to rely on a coincidence to send her away. He needed someone in one of his worlds to take her off his hands.  
Interesting.  
'But I do not know you, kitten, how can you be my hearts desire?'  
'I have no idea, love, but you're mine.'  
He jolted back in his chair, eyes wide. 'Whys that?'  
'Even if you do decide to kill me and by some miracle I die, like, really die. I will die happy, having seen you again, seeing Gus at the end. Even if its not my Gus, even if its you, any version of Gus will make me happy. I love my him. I have for a very long time and he loved me too.'  
'Demons can't love'. Crowley scoffed.  
'Maybe, but we were alright, in the end. I should have spent my whole life loving him, being in love with him, sometimes I want to reorder time and space to get him back. He knew me and I knew him.'  
'Really?” he glared at her, in clear disbelief.  
'I'm guessing your hearts desire is still what it was when you were human. You just wanted to be loved.' she wanted to touch him, she needed to touch him. He flinched from her words and stood up.   
'Listen, little Witch, whoever you are.'  
'Temperance.'  
'How do we send you back?' Dean barked, she jumped, she had almost forgotten him.  
'I don't know. I told you that I think god is messing with me.' She had nothing more to offer than her honesty.  
Crowley seemed frozen to the spot. He was looking at her intently, in a way that used to make her stomach swoop and her thighs tremble. 'Dean, go get the book.' he ordered.   
When Dean had stomped off with a grunt of indignation, he rounded on her.  
'What's my favourite colour?'  
'Blue' she frowned.  
'Favourite actor?'  
'Meryl Streep. Why?”  
'Favourite food?' he leaned over her, eyes flashing.  
'You have a thing for onion rings that you don't like to admit. Do you want me to reset your password or something? Your mother is a Witch. You drink Craig, you buy Italian wool, you're favourite song is by fucking Vivaldi and you pretend to ironically like Baby Got Back. You're vessel has a dragon tattoo, a knife scar and freckles on the top of its thighs. You like the monsoon smell of rain on hot earth and you fucking adore hellhound puppies.'  
He flushed, darkly and growled out 'Are we lovers?'  
'We were, you died. You don't have to believe me.'  
'Then you would know about all my kinks' he hissed, his threatening smile back in place.  
'You don't have many. You pretend that you do. You liked when I was on top, you always came fast when I would blow you.' His hands bit into her arms, cutting off her speech.  
'How can you, how?' he lost all composure for a moment, then seemed to withdraw. His grip became painful and he slammed her back into the wall, baring his teeth.  
'Who are you?'  
'You fucking know how to send me back, don't you?.'   
A little twitch of his mouth gave him away and she broke free as Dean appeared with the book.  
'Perhaps.' Crowley shot a guilty look at her.  
'Please just send me home. I cannot deal with this shit and I have things to do.' She didn't want to think about how fucked things might have gotten in her brief absence.  
Dean, who was not Dean, looked her over. 'How do we know this is real? Is this some Demonic shit?'  
'You're the ones who fuck about with magic, not me. Its not worth the hassle.' she decided not to add just how often magic came back to bite her in the ass.   
Crowley was flicking through his spell book, he frowned to himself a moment and snapped it shut.  
'Easy, all we have to do is break the pearl, it should release you back to wherever you're from.'  
'Great.' Dean grunted, he turned away and disappeared down the corridor.   
'He's not doing too well, is he?'  
'No.' Crowley put the book in the table, squared it with the long edge and plucking the pearl from his pocket.  
'Can I have the pearl?'  
'I wished for you' Crowley mused, rolling the pearl around in his fingers. She watched it wink under the harsh kitchen lights, like a tiny moon trapped in his fist.  
'Maybe you're supposed to be here?'  
'God sent me here to fuck with me.' she replied a little testily. Her Crowley had liked getting his own way, this one clearly lived with the same desires.   
'How do you know?' he pressed.  
She didn't answer that, she couldn't answer that, it was a feeling, an instinct. She trusted herself. She touched her pendant, thought her shirt. He followed the gesture, curiously and she pulled the emerald free.   
'You, my Gus, in my Universe, gave me this, so he could always find me. Always know where I was and if I needed you, him.'  
His eyes swivelled down to it and he grunted. 'Bollox.'  
'Bollox?'  
'That emerald, it's got a flaw inside the stone, looks like a little bolt of lightning.'  
'Yes.'   
It did, she liked to hold it up to the light and look at it. The pale fleck reminded her of minty milk and hot July weekends in Rome. The tiny crack winked brightly in the darker and clearer green of the surrounding emerald. She closed her fist around the stone, watching Crowley consider it. He stroked a finger over his lips, tapped them than said.  
'I saw it when I first returned to earth, just a regular crossroads Demon then. That colour green, that type of gem, to my mothers coven it means love. It means adoration. It is the colour to bond two souls as one. I threw it into a volcano in Iceland.'  
'My Gus had never been to Iceland.' she raised a brow.  
He huffed out a breath, something flickering about his mouth, amusement, perhaps.   
'No doubt because he kept that stone, he had someone in mind for it. I thought, when I first saw it, if I had ever loved someone I would have given her that. Would have it mounted in the purest welsh gold and make sure it could lay between her breasts, near her heart, so the whole world would know that she was mine.' His voice was velvet. He took a few steps forward, until they were almost touching.   
She realised that she was breathing him in, she wanted him. She knew this was a different Crowley, but, fuck it, it was a perfect copy.  
'My love, my life.' he purred.   
No. She tucked the pendant under her top. He wasn't her Crowley, she wasn't his love. Crowley was dead. She looked into this other mans eyes. They were Crowley's eyes, even now, there was something like desire in his gaze.  
'You loved him?' he asked, taking her wrist, running his hand over her arm.   
'I love him.' she agreed, shivering.  
'Theres a world where someone loved me. Me. You loved me.' he brushed a strand of her hair aside. His breath tickled her lips.  
'I still do, I always will.' she had to look away from the burning intensity of his eyes. His fingers were exploring her throat, stroking over her skin.  
'But I don't belong here.' she pressed.  
'I could take care of you. I'm the same man, the same Demon.' he insisted, his lips at her ear, so close to touching.  
They stood in silence, while her heart hammered. She could feel the hellish heat of his skin on her own, familiar as her face in the mirror. He must be able to hear her pulse racing.   
'I wished for you. Stay. Stay here,with me. Please, don't leave me.' he murmured.  
His lips now were a moment away from touching her own, soft and warm and perfect. Intoxicating. Crowley. It would be nice to stay, easy to stay. She could give in. Her eyes fluttered close, her breath was coming in a pant, she could almost taste him on her tongue.  
'Temperance.' he whispered and she pulled back, eyes open. She saw, finally she saw.  
'That fucker.' she said.   
He knew he couldn't get death to stick to her, he had put her here hoping she would want to stay, he had made a perfect Crowley, the one thing she couldn't resist.  
'Fucking cunt.' she growled thrusting her fist into his jacket and pulling out the pearl.   
'Who?'  
'God. I am going to fuck his shit right the fuck up.'  
'You are a delight, you know that?' Crowley chuckled, he bent in to try to kiss her again.  
She put her hand up to his face, thrust him back.  
'He's getting sloppy in his old age.' she dropped the pearl to the ground and with a stomp, crushed it underfoot.  
The world spun, slipping away like oil and in a soft rush it reformed.   
She knew she was home, power rushed in to fill the gaping hole inside of her, and Castiel was sprawled in the dirt under a hot sun.  
He groaned and she knelt down to pick him up, her grip on his arm was maybe a little too strong as she pulled him back to the Bunker. 

'I am sorry, I, I am not sure what happened.' Castiel cleared his throat and out a hand up to loosen his tie.  
She nodded, her heart felt very heavy. 'Its fine, I'm sorry you got pulled into this mess.'  
She opened the garage door and gestured him in before her.   
'Were you injured?'  
'No, you, he, sent me away, but I got back quickly enough.'  
'Temperance, I believe you, please forgive me for my earlier actions. I was not myself.' there was dust on his face, she wiped it off his cheek with the end of his tie. '  
Its ok.'  
'You are upset, I can tell.'  
'Not at you though.' she tried to smile, but her face didn't want to do what she told it. She left him there and went to drown her sorrows in something well aged and bottled but she didn't make it to her bedroom.  
Sam was leaving the bathroom, and he shrieked and dashed forward.   
'Tem! You've been gone for hours. We thought you left without saying goodbye.'  
'We need to have one of those sit downs.' she snapped. 'One where we end up changing the world.'  
She was done pretending, if Chuck was going to play dirty so was she.   
Sam followed her to the kitchen, where Dean was platting up dinner, directing Castiel to get cutlery from the drawer. John was sitting down at the table, setting out glasses.  
'Hey, you're back.' he spoke, cheerfully enough, as Dean announced.  
'Chows up!'  
John had Dean's smirk, Dean's good looks, though heavier and darker. She had the other worlds Dean to compare it to. Torment, a lot of pain made a person look like that. She picked up a bottle of wine and rummaged for a corkscrew.   
'I need a drink.'  
He barked a laugh, took the bottle from her hands and pulled the cork. She watched him carefully take the cork from the screw, heavy brows bent over dark eyes. They were all here, gathered round, she should get this over with.  
'I know how to fix you.' she said, to John.  
He leaned forward, angling his face towards her, trapping her with those eyes. It was a sex look, a straight up, bedroom eye, look.   
'How?'  
'Are you trying to eye fuck the answer out of me?' she asked idly.  
'If you want me to.' he smiled, easily once more.  
She slid down the bench, making room for Dean. 'We need to kill god.'  
The conversation stopped, Dean froze with his spatula in midair.   
'Say that again.' his voice strangled.  
'You heard me.' she plucked the wine from John's frozen fingers and poured a glass. It was a dark enough to look purple, she twirled the stem of the glass in her fingers, drank it down without tasting it.  
'Kill him stone dead.' she added, as no one else had spoken.  
Castiel hadn't bothered to set himself a place, but he sat down with them and when she caught his eye he nodded, firmly.   
'You can't kill god.' Sam's tone careful, he eyed her with the same worry he might give a wild animal. An unpredictable wild animal.  
'Why not?'  
'Existence as we know it might cease to exist.' John pointed out.  
Dean set down plates of food for them, he had made a dish of meatballs and a steaming bowl of tagletelli. She spun the pasta round on her fork, digging in while the men attacked the meat.   
'I reckon I could do it.'  
'Do what?' Sam scowled, stabbing his food with his fork.  
'Kill god.' The pasta was nice, the silky sauce that covered it was rich with garlic and tomato. She licked her lips, eyeing the bowl and considering seconds.   
Sam snorted at that, his tone was a little cruel when he said.   
'If anyone could.'   
John put down his fork and eyed her across the table. 'Why?”  
'I'm sick of him. I'm fucking sick to death of him.' she poured more wine.  
'Me too.' Dean murmured.   
'Too bad we can't kill God, he's God.' Sam rolled his eyes, not entertaining the notion.  
'Not likely he can just die.' John nodded.   
'Everything can die, in a way. Somethings take longer than others, some of them are harder to kill.' she touched the chain around her neck, she was pretty hard to kill, as it turned out.  
Dean sighed heavily, breathing out through his nose. 'Can we just have dinner?'  
She smiled, reaching over to squeeze his hand. 'It's really good.'  
'Yeah? Course it is, I made it.' he laughed, a little strained, his kind eyes were troubled. He gave her the smallest nod, barely a nod, but she saw it. He was careful, he was sure neither of the other men were looking, he agreed with her.  
Round three, its a draw. Temperance looked into her glass, as if to divine inspiration, he's got the world, but I have one Winchester and the King of Heaven. Your move, Chuck. 

Dean pulled out his phone and put on some music, they cleaned up while Thin Lizzy thumped away in the background.  
'They want you to go back to Hell.' He spoke quietly as they washed the dishes.   
Castiel was covering leftovers and stacking them in the fridge. He kept his eyes on the open door.  
'Chuck wants me out of the way. He's getting a little desperate.'  
'What do you mean?' Dean's eyebrows had almost vanished, he looked shocked as he wiped a clean dish to a shine.  
'He can't kill me here, can't pull me down to Hell unless I want to go, so he tried to put me somewhere to neutralise me. He cant afford to fight me, and I will fight him. What he's doing to me doesn't bother me, its whatever he's planning to do to you that has me worried.'  
'You're gonna have to tell me everything.' Dean's face was hard, she could practically see the cogs spinning in his mind.   
'He wants me out of the way, because I'll stop him doing what ever it is he's planning.'  
'We are assuming another apocalypse.' Castiel put in, still watching the door.  
'Which you two will no doubt be drafted to stop.'  
'Temperance is of the opinion that God is using you and Sam and playthings. I agree with her, as much as it pains me. After reflecting on your history its easy to see how much chaos has been thrown at you, you have risen most admirably to the occasion, each and every time you have saved the world.'  
'So the next one might be the last one, the big one.' Temperance looked at the grey suds in the sink and fished out the plug.   
Dean was a pillar beside her, a thousand yard stare and angry mouth. 'I know somethings been messing with me, with my head. Are you sure that God is planning the end?'  
'Its more of a feeling than a fact.'   
'Before we go any further, we need to know what is happening in Hell.' Castiel said.  
'Tem aint going!' Dean spun around, finger raised.  
'I agree. I will go and see what I can find out.' he nodded and vanished.  
'Sam and dad have been pushing that on me all day.' Dean poured the last of the wine into a glass, stared at it, then opened a beer instead.   
'How come I don't want to send you to Hell, damnit, when you almost got pulled apart it was like I could see how wrong all my thoughts had been. I didn't know the person who had been thinking about raising the Cage or any of that.'  
'Chuck lost control over you. I don't know how, but, I'm fucking thrilled by it.'  
'Tem, I wanted to hurt you, I tried to hit you.'  
'But you didn't.' she took his fee hand in hers, their fingers were wrinkled from the washing water.  
'Can we free Sam and dad?'   
'I hope so.'  
There was an aura of nervous energy around him. When they had put away the plates and were heading to their rooms he stopped by her door.  
'No matter what, I'm no your side, ok. Even if Chuck gets me again, me, the real me, is always on your side.'   
'I know.' she stood on her tip-toes and kissed his cheek, when she pulled back he looked terribly sad.  
'This is gonna be a big one, worse than Lucifer, or Michael or all that stuff with your Dad.'  
'I'm not worried.' she wasn't, not really, it seemed so much simpler knowing she had someone to do this with.  
'What? Why?' he asked, bemusedly.   
'You've gotten us through everything else, why would this be any different?' she said, with a shrug, he didn't answer, but there was confident spring in his step as he headed to bed.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...She summoned the gun to her hands, it sped out of Dean's grasp and settled in hers in an instant. She put the Colt to her head and cocked it.  
> 'You're bluffing.' Papa said, seeing to the crux of the matter as usual.  
> 'Am I? Theres bout 5 things this gun couldn't kill, and I have no idea if I'm one of them.....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

The problem was, and it was a huge problem. Beyond a vague feeling of unease that struck worry in the pit of her belly, Temperance had no proof that god was up to anything to worry about. Maybe, maybe, he just didn't want her around, which was fair enough she barely wanted herself around sometimes. Maybe he wasn't planning anything that would harm Sam and Dean.  
Maybe.  
Temperance fidgeted when she was thinking, she usually drummed to get her thoughts in order, but she didn't want to right then. She didn't want to draw Sam or John's attention, she was convinced that they had been turned against her.   
Reality felt painful, she picked up a battered copy of The Vinaya that she didn't remember owning or taking from the library, she flipped open the cover and saw a familiar spiky scrawl on the flyleaf. At some stage, years passed, John Constantine's living hand had traced ink into those words, it was a shopping list. Not a very expansive one, there were three items on it: Cigarettes, Beer, Pigs Blood. That sounded like a wild night in.  
It was a strange book of his to unearth, it mainly dealt with the order of monastic life, she couldn't imagine why he had owned it. She set it aside, decided to organise her socks into matching pairs, but her hand kept drifting back to the damn thing.   
She lay back on her bed and thumbed through the cheap paper, the corners were dogeared and one chapter, the Uposatha, was folded down. Someone had underlined a phrase here and there on the page, 'cleansing the disordered mind', and 'Vishvakarman'  
John had written down the margin, in capital letters 'Quantum Engineering?'. She sighed and shut the book again, that meant nothing to her. She had never been great shakes at Physics and she had never studied Buddhism.   
Cigarettes, beer, pigs blood, holy days of obligation and physics. It sounded like the set up of a bad joke.   
The pasta wasn't sitting well in her stomach, it felt like a lead weight pressing her into the bed. She didn't like the game she was playing, she didn't like not knowing. The book seemed to mock her from the nightstand and she flung it across the room before thumping her pillow into a better shape and trying to get her mind in order.

Things got strange, really strange, the Map lit up sporadically and the news reports were full of out of season storms and wildfires. In the pantry all the fresh food rotted overnight and the wards around the bunker kept bouncing around and failing. The world was acting up, it was almost May and it had been snowing since Castiel left to scope out Hell.   
Sam and John were quiet around Temperance, Dean saw them shuffle away from her when she approached, he saw it hurt her a little more each time they did it. The set of her jaw hardening, her eyes glazing over.  
Dean started checking all the guns were locked up at night, he barely slept in case he missed Castiel. There was nothing but silence from the Angel, he text him, he called him, he prayed to him and by Monday morning, after a week of static, his teeth were on edge. A knock on his door made him leap out of his skin.  
'Sam?'  
'Can we talk?'  
His baby brother was still dressed in the clothes he had on yesterday, and as he moved to let him pass Dean saw the tail of his shirt sitting awkwardly over a gun. He tried to smile, tried to act easy.   
'You ok, Sammy?'  
'Its Tem, Dean, we need to send her back to Hell.' he stood by the desk, his feet planted carefully apart. Dean hated thinking about the time Sam was soulless, it made his gut churn to remember the dead look in his eyes, to see his clever mind turned to violence. Whatever was going on with Sam, it was making him look like that again.  
'Why?' he kept his hand curled around the door and his back to the wall. Sam's brow wrinkled as he spoke, with concern.  
'It isn't just about Dad, she said it herself, things have been out of balance since she came back. Its like nature is telling her she needs to be there. Think of the risk she poses!'  
'Poses to who? Tem isn't about to hurt anyone.' he followed Sam's hand as it twitched, minutely, towards his gun. Pressure built in his chest, not this, not Sam. Please, God.  
'She poses a risk to everyone, to the world. Look, if we send her back and nothing changes then we can go get her!'  
'So, what we send her away but ask her not to close the Gates of Hell?'  
'Well.' Sam shuffled his feet, he had the grace to look a little embarrassed.  
'Sam, we can't throw her away. She's family!'  
'No, no she's not, Dean. She's not even human. We are family, me, you and Dad and we have a job to do! We protect innocent people from things like her!'  
'Things like her? So,Tem is a thing now?'  
'Dean!' he threw up his hands in defeat.  
'No, just, get out Sam. We aint talking about this.' he watched him down the hall and slammed the door, his heart pounding against his ribs so hard it hurt. There was a coppery taste in the back of his mouth. Fear, worry and anger all mingling together.

'Sam's gonna do something.'  
He had cornered Temperance in the bathroom, they were both brushing their teeth, the door ajar, watching in the mirror incase anyone walked in.   
She put her toothbrush down, met his glance in the mirror and said. 'You have to choose him, if it comes to it.'  
'Tem, it aint gonna come to it, we're gonna fix this.'  
'Promise me.'  
'No.'  
'Dean Winchester, promise me or I'll head down to Hell, right now!'  
'You can't go down there alone, something got Cas when he went down and he's just as powerful as you.' He held tightly to her wrist, keeping her there by sheer force of will. He was worried, he was fucking terrified. He couldn't loose her, he had lost Sam, he had lost his dad.   
'You know, you always use the same sink.' The door creaked open slightly, John was leaning against the frame, his arms folded across his chest.  
Temperance froze, her hand a hairs-breath away from the tap. 'Oh, thats clever.'  
John sauntered forward, he plucked the shower head from its hook and turned the spray on the ground. Water pooled on the tile in a strange pattern, a Trap.  
'Wax.' he said. The Colt was in his hand and he aimed it at her.   
'Dad.'  
'Dean, move away.'  
'Dad, please.' he raised his hands and his dad shot, a chunk of tile shattered just to the left of arm. The sound rang in his ears.   
'Shut up, Dean! I gave you an order.' he demanded.  
'Dean.' Temperance spoke in a measure voice, he looked at her and backed off. He kept his hands up, he was under no illusions that his dad would hesitate to shoot him if he tried to get the drop on the man.   
'You wanna give me a reason not to shoot you?'  
'Can't think of one.' she said, turning around to look at him.  
'If I shoot you, you get pulled down below, don't you. You wont have a body to posses and you can't walk around up here without one.'  
'I'll let her in.' Dean growled, a deep, unsettling horror was crawling around inside him. His family was falling apart, God was tearing his family apart.   
'No you fucking will not Dean Winchester!' Temperance shot him a look, an angry look, a look that reminded him how much Demon there was inside her. Her eyes glinted with fire as she scowled, every inch the drug fuelled punk he knew and loved.   
'Shoot me, go on, it wont fucking solve anything.'  
'You know, kid, you have a lot of nerve. I like that, but tone it down for a second. I have a couple of questions for you, and you're gonna answer them.'  
'Would have without this.' she muttered gesturing to the ground.   
'So, you kill God and I get to be human again?' John had the knack for X-raying someone with a glance. It was unsettling. Dean had been under that stare enough to know.  
'Yes.'  
'Is that you're price for my help, can you fix me anyway?' his voice heavy with scorn.  
Dean reasoned that John was tuned to think the worst of her now and he hadn't known her that well before. He hadn't seen her helping people, cooking, cleaning, dancing. He hadn't seen her holding him and Sam together, he hadn't seen her die.   
'No, I'm sorry John. I don't know how to undo whats been done to you, but I am positive that it can be undone. Chuck isn't going to hand out mortality easily.'  
His lips curled downward and he grunted. 'Its strange, but, I feel like I should trust you and I don't.'  
'I get that a lot.'  
'Is that God, is that him making me feel like that? Is he in my damn head making me think different?' he tapped the barrel of the Colt into his palm.  
'I think so, but I've no proof.'   
Dean was nodding, desperately, but his dad wasn't looking at him.  
'You know, that aint exactly filling me with confidence.' John said, evenly.   
She shrugged. Dean knew that she wished she had more to go on too, Dean wished they had more to go on, but he trusted her. He trusted her to the ends of the Earth and back.   
'If you're lying, I am going to beat the holy fucking fuck out of you.'  
'If I'm wrong you'll have to get in line.'   
He nodded to the ground, wiped his mouth and held out the pistol to Dean.  
Dean took it from him, relief flooding through him. The metal was warm in his fist.   
'You're with us?' he asked  
'With you.' John clarified.  
Temperance relaxed her shoulders and crossed the ward.  
'How?' John jumped back, his brows raised.  
'You made a few mistakes.' she pointed to a corner, where the water was flowing over the wax. John smirked at her.  
'Shit, you could have taken me down at any time, huh?'  
She nodded.   
Dean didn't know wether to be relieved or horrified, he slid the pistol into his shoulder holster and buttoned his shirt closed. 'Ok, we need a plan.'  
'We need to try get through to Sam. I don't know how, I still want her down in Hell but, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that I'm being manipulated here.' John said.  
Dean sighed, he rubbed his hand over his eyes, how was it still morning, surely another week should have passed by now.   
'Tem, you wanna try talking to him?'  
'Not particularly.' she moved towards the door, he knew her well enough to know she was headed for Sammy. He beckoned his dad to follow him and went to get his weapons ready, they were in for a fight.

'Sam?' Temperance poked her head around the library door, he was sitting in his usual place, laptop open.  
'Hey,' his voice guarded, she saw his hand dip under the table and knew he had a gun trained on her.  
'Sam, can we talk?'  
'Sure.' he flashed a cautious smile.  
'I'm not your enemy.' she decided to dive right in.  
'Tem.' he shook his head, sighing.  
'I want whats best for you. Me getting stuck in Hell and doing what Chuck wants is not whats best for you.'  
'How do you know that, huh?” He stood up, his fists planted on the table.   
'Its a hunch.'  
'A hunch.' He loaded the word with disgust, narrowing his eyes as he rolled it around his mouth.   
'I just need you to trust me.'  
'No, not this time. I can't trust you when you want to fight against God, or Destiny or whatever.'  
'Not so much fight, as kill.' she pointed out, deadpan. He hated that tone and she used it, waiting for the great flood of his anger to burst forth at her.   
'You can't kill God! We don't want to kill God!' Sam roared, throwing his note book across the table, it skittered over the wood and slipped out of sight.   
A vein was pulsing on his forehead and his skin was flushed red, it was more that anger, it was more than rage. He jabbed a finger at her, a threatening finger.   
'Drop it, just, drop it Goddamn it.'  
His face was creased with disgust, she could practically see it dripping down his brain stem, coating him, becoming him. Nothing she could say was going to get through to him, he was gone.  
'I can't, I wish I could.'  
'Sometimes I forget.' He shook his head.  
'Forget what?'  
'That you're not human.' Sam looked at her then, venom in his brown eyes.  
'I've never fucking claimed to be.'   
Pain was rising like a knot in the back of her throat. So this was exactly how much shit she could put up with. It pressed against her teeth, desperate to break out as a sob, she wanted to wail and keen for everything had had been broken. She straightened her back, she took a steady breath. Sam was her enemy.  
Sam was looking through her now, he was turning away. This was it, this was the last chance she would get. Chuck had re-written his hero, the world was changing yet again. Sam hated her.  
'I would do anything to keep you safe.' she said, sadly.   
'Go, now.' he snarled, his hands curling into fists.   
'Or what?'  
'Or I'll take you down.'  
'Bye, Sammy.'  
She let her body slide away, through space, out of his path.

Dean and John were waiting in town, leaning against the side of the Impala, she had a brief flash of memory, of meeting Sam and Dean in a similar pose, it had been Autumn then, she had been in a bad place.  
Dean caught her eye and she shook her head. Sam wasn't coming.   
'Damnit.' he worked his mouth, as if to spit, then turned away.  
'So, whats next?' John had his brown jacket folded over his arms, she wondered if he had a gun on her beneath it.  
Well, there was nothing more to do, she hitched on her punk rock attitude and said.  
'Gentlemen, lets head on down to Hell, take over and fuck shit up.'  
'Don't threaten me with a good time, kid.' John shrugged into his brown leather jacket. He gave Dean a nod and bent into the boot, loading himself up with weapons.  
'We gotta find Cas and Papa Midnite, do we split up for that?'  
Dean considered it 'You take Papa, we'll get Cas.'  
He was slipping warded handcuffs and a few dozen zip-ties into his back pocket.  
'I have absolute faith in you.' she said, meaning it.  
He cocked his head to the side, a small, bemused smile gracing his face. She reached out to the father and son and they took her offered hands.  
'Lets do this.' Dean said.  
The corridor to the Dungeons seemed abandoned, she dropped them there to look for Castiel and she marched towards the Throne room.  
'Nelle tenebre etterne in caldo e n'gelo*.' she muttered, rounding a corner and banishing an approaching Demon with a click of her fingers. It was far to easy to do that down here.  
She hadn't enjoyed studying Dante, but the man had a way with words when it came to this place. Where the flaming torches had warmed the ceiling a layer of ancient frost had melted and turned to blood on the floor, it ran down the walls in rivulets to be churned by passing feet to crimson mud and gore.   
She could smell suffering in the air and a flare of anger rose up in her throat, turning to a growl as she stomped on. She owned this shit-hole, she really needed to get it in order. 

The Dungeons were poorly lit with dim torches placed sporadically along the walls. There was something off putting about the set of the floor that made it hard to look at and difficult to judge distance, but he reckoned that they had only been walking for a few seconds.  
'How do we find him?' John asked in a low whisper.  
Dean mulled it over, then pulled out his phone.   
'You get signal down here?' John chuckled.  
'5G.' he said, finding Castiel's number and pressing dial. A thin tune rang out in the gloom.  
'Zeppelin?' John asked, his brows raised.   
'I made him a mixtape.'  
'You made an Angel a mixtape and you've got the hots for the Devil, Christ Dean, I did not raise you right.'  
Dean made a note to answer that later, but they had work to do now. He hurried towards the ringtone, almost slipping as the ground went in and out of focus beneath him. He hated this place, he hated being here, it made him feel like he was loosing his grip on reality.   
The cell was dark and dank, but he could make out a shape slumped inside.  
'Castiel?'  
John poked his head into the gap, then gasped, and wrenched open the door. The torchlight fell on a blonde head, a woman's long hair cascading over bare arms. She was huddled against the wall, and whimpered as the light hit her.  
'Mary!' John ran in.  
'Wait Dad!'  
It was too late, John had crossed the threshold and was kneeling down on the stone, gently prying the woman's arms from her face. Something slid in Dean's peripheral vision and he spun, pulling his gun out.   
'Mary, its me, its John.' his Dads voice had never sounded so happy.   
A growl rang out through the corridor and sent a shudder down Dean's spine. Shit. 'Hellhounds!'   
Paws clicked on the floor and long invisible claws sparked as the beast moved. Dean raised his knife in his other fist, it had been edged with salt and holy water, if he could just see the damn things he would have a good shot against them.  
'Dad we gotta move. This place is messing without you, its a trap!' he called.  
An unseen Hound growled, very close to Dean's face. He gulped, slashed wildly, but didn't seem to encounter any resistance.   
'Dad!' he pleaded, but John didn't move from the cell, he was entranced by the woman, by the thing he thought was his wife.   
'John.'   
Dean couldn't remember his moms voice, he didn't know what she sounded like when he was a kid, it had been too long since he heard it, but when the creature spoke John cried out, happily.  
'It is you!'  
'Dad its not! Its a trick!'   
Dean was standing wide over the threshold, something kicked into his side and sent him spinning. He lost his balance, managed to grab onto the door and slam it shut, locking the Hounds in the hall.  
A chorus of barks and howls began as he hurried to his fathers side, John was beaming at the woman, stroking her long hair. He grabbed his arm, trying to shake him loose.   
'Dad, we gotta move.'  
'Its your mother, Dean, its my Mary.'  
The woman smiled, she put out her hands, as if begging John to hold her.  
Before Dean could speak, something strong and sharp snapped around his shoulder and he flew through the air, landing with a grunt of pain on the ground.  
There was a Hound inside with them.  
'Shit.' he fired wildly, the growl of the beast echoing off the stone with each ringing shot was like laughter.  
It had him, it was on him, teeth tore into his hand and he dropped the gun, screaming as his bones crushed. Huge, sharp, deadly claws dug into his gut and hit chest as the thing clambered over him body for a better grip. He swung his tattered fist and slapped the monster across its flank, he could see the disembodied handprint in the gloom.   
Acidic spit began to burn in his wound and he writhed in pain, stabbing at nothing with his knife in his off hand. Those massive, vile, jaws locked over his shoulder, close to his throat and worried him, like a rag-doll.  
It hurt, fuck it hurt too much. John didn't move, he was stock still, gazing at the image of his dead wife.  
'Dad, please!' Dean gasped, hot blood was flowing down his chest, the Hound dug his teeth in harder, ripping through his muscle.  
'Dad, don't let it kill me.' his voice was weak, desperate, pain blinded him.  
This was it, he was going to die, this thing was gonna rip him to shreds, he gripped his knife with all his strength, ready to go down swinging.   
The shot rang out, a weight crumpled onto his chest.  
'I'm here, Dean, don't worry. Its ok.'  
John hoisted him to his feet and led him out of the apparently empty cell.  
'Thank you.'  
'I'm sorry son, it was a spell, it got me.'  
'S'ok, need to find Cas.' pain tore at his chest as he hobbled down the hall on Johns arm.  
'Cas!' he called out, coughing hoarsely.   
'Down here!' a weak voice shouted, desperately, chains rattled against stone, calling them forward.  
'I'm here!'

As Temperance approached the great doors of her Throne room they burst open and clanged off the stone. She noted, idly, that Papa had wasted no time redecorating. Black velvet and red satin draped the tall windows and hung from the vaulted ceiling in long shining bolts. Candles blazed in elaborate holders and the Throne had been picked out with skulls and long bones.   
'Subtle.' she eyed a black hen, skittering away into the shadows.  
Papa was standing by an alter, when she entered the room she jumped, guiltily. He looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.He backed slowly away from a silver platter. He was wearing a suit made of gold brocade and had a white hat, at a jaunty angle, on his head. She walked up, took his silk clad shoulder and punched him in the face.   
There was a very satisfying wet crunch as his nose broke and the force of it sent him sprawling on the stone.  
'Nice to see you Papa.'  
'Apprentice.' he managed, thickly, holding his nose with a gloved hand.  
The alter was littered with black candles, blood, feathers, and at its centre were a handful of manikins.  
'Voodoo dolls.' she plucked one up, a scrap of familiar flannel was sewn around it, a hex bag tied tightly over its face. She pulled this off and dumped the contents out.   
'Would you believe me if I said that I did not set out to betray you?'  
'No.'  
She set down the doll and blew out the candle. 'Why the fuck does magic even work for you anymore?'  
'Its all a question of belief, child.' he spoke delicately, she considered burning him down to ash, but resisted the impulse. She stalked him as he began to move.  
God had been manipulating him too, no doubt. She watched him scurry to put some distance between them and felt a little flash of pleasure at the thought that he was afraid. There was a notched machete in his belt, she took it from him and he didn't try to stop her.  
'I've been blaming god, could have dealt with this sooner. Smart move on his part, not getting his hands dirty.' she laid the blade on his shoulder, edge to his throat.  
'Don't tell me you're not a little impressed by how well I played you.' he said, slyly.   
'No, I'm not even a little impressed. I am very, very disappointed.'  
'It is the duty of the young to outgrow their elders, to become better, to become disappointed.' he tried to brush the machete away and she froze him with a glare.  
'I should have let Constantine kill you back in New Orleans.'  
'That jackass of all trades would never.' he began, she cut him off, pushing the blade against his skin.  
'Go on, one more insult, lets see how much more dead you can get.' her felt her eyes flickering madly as power built up, looking for an exit.  
He swallowed, raised his hands in defeat and she backed off, throwing the machete, with force, into the nearest skull decoration. She kicked the tottering pile of them from the dais and watched her old Master, hands on her hips.   
'Well, tell me whats happening, we both know you'd crack under torture in about 45 seconds.'  
'The Almighty is very concerned about you.' he said, his voice as smooth as ever.  
'He wants me alive?' she assumed as much, but she wanted confirmation.   
'Yes. To Cage you, for all eternity, to use your power to supplement his own. He thinks you could be useful.'  
'You would do that to me, Papa? What did he offer you, what was that betrayal worth?' she had been his apprentice, there was a sacred bond between them, not a father to a daughter, but familial all the same.   
'He promised to raise my sister, to let her enter Heaven and live once more.' He took off his feathered hat and held it to his chest.   
She examined him, with sudden pity. This man had saved her life, this man had given her a purpose and pulled her out of the worst depths of her depression. This man had lied to her and manipulated her and conspired with her enemies. Papa was just a man though, he might have been a powerful, ancient Priest on Earth, but he was still just a man.  
'Luna is in Hell because of you.'  
Temperance had never met the woman, but she knew what had happened. They had been twins, strong with magical power, he had killed her, he had been forced to kill her, but then rather than raising her he had sent her to Hell to give him eyes and ears among the fallen. He had damned her soul to further his own agenda.   
From the petal strewn floor, Papa reached out to her with one trembling hand. 'You do not understand the pain I have endured, if I can save her, I shall.'  
John, a battered Castiel and a very bloody Dean stumbled through the door. Dean slumped against a pillar, watching her intently.  
Brothers and sisters, family. She looked at Castiel, carefully helping Dean, at John who had a shotgun aimed at Papa. She couldn't fault him, not really, if Dean or Sam was in the same position she would have done anything to get them out.   
Chuck knew how to fuck with people, he knew everyones weak points, because he had made them.  
She felt her Wings unfurling, she couldn't have held back, even if she wanted to. Impotent rage had poured out of her. It all came back to god, in the end. They were all reading of fucking scripts, so maybe she was too. Maybe he had, indeed, written her to be the antagonist, the snake in the grass.  
'I do understand.' she said, her voice echoing strangely.  
Dean was gripping the Colt in his bloody lap. It glinted under the candlelight, elegant and silver and old. She summoned the gun to her hands, it sped out of Dean's grasp and settled in hers in an instant. She put the colt to her head and cocked it.   
'You're bluffing.' Papa said, seeing the crux of the matter as usual.  
'Am I? Theres bout 5 things this gun couldn't kill, and I have no idea if I'm one of them. If it works, gods plan is well fucked. There will be no more 'me' to use.'  
She pulled the trigger, grinning manically. Papa's eyes were wide and he lunged forward, as if to knock her hands aside. The hammer hit the bullet, the bullet left the chamber and rammed through skin and bone and grey matter and embedded itself in the wall to her right. 

'Guess I'm not on the kill list.' she said, her ears were ringing, she could smell death and singed hair. She drew on her ruined Grace, healing the wound as Papa Midnite sank to the ground, shaking.  
'Forgive me, apprentice.' he begged.  
'I'm not your apprentice.' she spat, walking over him and sitting on her Throne. Taking a leaf out of Crowley's book she steepled her fingers together, elbows on the arm rest and gazed down at him. She knew her eyes were fiery now, she knew her Grace was a changed and tainted thing.  
'I'm the mother fucking Devil you silly cunt, now get up, and get out and never try to cross me again!'  
He hurried to his feet bowing and scraping as he backed from the room. The doors clanged shut on his face and she turned her eyes on Dean. He looked petrified. His skin began to knit together under her gaze, he stood, shakily and scowled at her.  
'Oh, stop.' she begged, dropping her shoulders and groaning.   
'Never. Do. That. Again.' he demanded, wrenching the gun from her hand and raising it up as if he wanted to beat her about the head with it.   
John was examining the alter, he poked at the remains of the dolls and shook his head 'How do we get rid of all this?'  
She considered for a moment, then clicked her fingers. The stone and all the magical paraphernalia vanished, rising up like wisps of smoke.  
'Is Sam ok?' Dean asked.  
'Yeah, should be right as rain, as should you.' she pointed to John.  
Castiel walked up to him, out a hand to his head, then froze. 'Oh.'  
'Oh.' echoed Temperance, seeing him clearly.  
'Oh?' John looked worried.  
'Castiel's Grace is gone.'  
'I am human.' he agreed, touching his chest.  
'Am I?' John began, eyes darting between Castiel and Temperance. His panic flared quickly, Temperance saw his heart rate stutter, then rise.   
She walked over to him and took his hands, trying to project an aura of calm that did not come naturally to her. She folded up her wings, made herself small and ordinary.   
'The enchantment is gone, you're normal again, your mortal.'  
'Well, something worked out fucking well.' Dean said, sourly. His shirt was in tatters and he stank of wet dog.  
She took Castiel by the arm, guiding him towards the Throne.  
'What happened?' she asked trying to find some remnant of his power with her own.  
'I came to gather information, as we discussed, but I was discovered, by my Father.'  
'Ah jaysus.' she sat down heavily on the dais, kicking a few more skulls out of the way. She needed to get this place cleaned up.   
'He was not pleased to find me here, he took my Grace from me and, well, he questioned me.'  
'Questioned?' Dean asked, scooting closer, he put a hand onto Castiel's arm and the ex-Angel patted it, almost managing a smile.  
'Tortured.' Temperance clarified, she could feel the wounds that had been inflicted on him, it went beyond his Grace being stripped and his wings being plucked, he had been hurt, again and again. Time moved very differently in Hell, it had been a week for her on Earth, but much longer for Castiel in that dungeon.  
'He asked me things, things I did not have an answer for. He asked if you had made a move to stop his next Apocalypse.' his dark blue eyes settled heavily on Temperance.   
'Sweet vindication.' she spat. Never had it felt less good to be right about something, Castile looked desperately unhappy.  
'Did he say anything specific about it?' John put in.  
'No, but he mentioned Sam and Dean and it being their destIny.'  
'Fuck sake.' Temperance shook her head, standing up and striding the length of room and back again, her jaw clenched tightly.  
'Are you ok, Cas?' Dean said gently.  
'I am hungry.' Castiel noted, curiosity painting his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Into eternal darkness, into fire and into ice - The Inferno - Dante


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ....Hell morphed around them. It was like a dream, suddenly the Palace was miles away and they were standing on a barren slope, looking down at a dark chasm. There was a gate way, a veil of fire and light that seemed to hang, jagged and horrific, in the sky. Where it reached the ground the dusty soil was burned black.  
> 'After you.' she said with a wink....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

Temperance sent Castiel and John back to the bunker, John was stoic, he had taken the ex-Angel by the arm and promised to make him a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.  
Dean stayed, waiting for the new Devil to stop looking quite so annoyed.  
'I know that he was important to you, the Voodoo guy.'  
She nodded, kicking a stray skull out of her path.   
'I suppose I should, I dunno, torture him, or something?' She looked around the room, went to a wall and pushed a curtain aside. It fell in a heap on the floor.  
'I'm going to make him redecorate this place without magic, I'm thinking something industrial, something with harsh lighting and bad graffiti.'  
'Uh, ok?' redecorating sounded like torture to him, who was he to offer pointers.   
'Trust me, that will piss him off.'  
'What about his sister, Luna was it?' Dean had been in bad shape when they arrived, but he had caught the tail end of that conversation.  
'Ah.' she tapped her fingers on her elbows, a far away look in her eyes.   
She looked, somehow, even more annoyed and aimed a look of pure disgust at the Throne.  
'I think she's a Demon now, I don't know if I can undo that.'  
'Can you leave, without a Regent.' he jabbed his thumb over his shoulder towards the dais. He was worried about her getting stuck here, as he spoke he realised he would offer to stay and he'd mean it. If she was stuck down here he'd hang out until they got her a way back.  
'I think I should shut it down, close the Gates, get it over with.'  
She was staring at the Throne now, contemplating it from afar. He was shocked enough by the declaration to immediately poke holes in her plan.   
'Yeah, but whose gonna run it?'  
'Papa, of course.'  
'Uh, the guy who fucked us? The guy you just said you should torture?'  
'Ah, yeah.' she waved this away.  
'Temperance!' he noticed she jumped a little when he used her full name like that, a slick of amusement at the thought he could worry the Devil.   
'He will do it right, running the show. He's the only one I'd trust to.'  
'Trust!' he scrubbed his hands over his eyes. This woman had a skewed understanding of trust, he had always known that. Her best friend had been Crowley for christ-sake.   
He choose his words carefully 'How can you trust him?'  
'I can trust him to run Hell fairly. He might try and fuck me over again, but I don't think god will replay that hand. I think it should be fine.'   
He wanted to keep arguing, but before he opened his mouth he could see she had dug her heels in, she wasn't going to budge  
'Ok, how do we close the Gates?'  
'I don't know, lets find out.' She strode forward, taking his hand. Her fingers were slim to be so strong, when he had first held them they had been scarred and calloused. That had been before she had died, before she had really started to change.  
Hell morphed around her. It was like a dream, suddenly the Palace was miles away and they were standing on a barren slope, looking down at a dark chasm. There was a gate way, a veil of fire and light that seemed to hang, jagged and horrific, in the sky. Where it reached the ground the dusty soil was burned black.  
'After you.' she said with a wink.  
'What is this?'  
'The Gate, I'm going to close it.'  
He reached out, wanted to touch it, then drew away sharply. She was suspiciously calm about all this.  
'No way, not until you go through first.'   
'You have trust issues.' she said, smiling, but she jumped across the barrier without another word and thrust a hand back through to beckon him to follow.   
He took a deep breath, grabbed her fingers and was jolted off his feet. The world rushed around him and his legs buckled onto hard dirt.  
'The hell?' his ears were ringing.  
'Earth, actually.' She was standing in front of a tree, an old looking one. The roots reared up over the ground and the branches were twisted and bent at odd angles.  
Her hands pressed into the bark, it yielded like butter to her touch, and she pushed forward to her elbows. He saw her biceps flex under her shirt and she moved slowly backwards pulling the something of the tree from inside-out.  
There was a clang, but it wasn't a noise, not really, it was an idea, rattling harshly inside Dean's head, he clapped his hands over his ears and winced away from it.  
When the noise had subsided he groaned and turned back to her.   
She dusted her hands down, and blew a few stands of her hair out of her face. Her eyes, he realised, were black as night.  
'Tem?' he motioned to his own eyes and she blinked suddenly. Her eyes went white and shinning then back to human grey.  
'Huh.' she put a hand up to her face.  
'You're, not the Queen anymore?'  
'Guess not.' she looked at the tree, then shrugged and spun around, arms spread wide.  
'Well, thats that.' there was a laugh in her voice.  
'Hell is closed?' he looked skeptically at the flaking bark.  
'Yep.'  
'It can't have been that easy.' he touched the tree, expecting the wood to be hot or sticky, or something, under his fingers. It was just a tree, just a boring old tree.  
'It wasn't' she raised a brow and looked at him and he saw that there was blood on her hands, welling up from under her fingernails and blood seeping out around her hairline.  
'Shit, you ok?' He reached out to touch a dark drop that was rolling over her temple.   
'I could use a drink.' she said. He was close enough to count the lashes around her eyes, to see the crumbling line of her makeup as her eyeliner started to smudge. How did she make that slept in a cab look, look so good.   
'You could always use a drink.' he smiled, he liked when she smiled back.  
She took his hand once more and pulled him away, they landed neatly outside the Bunker, the sun was coming up, bathing the old walls in gold. 

Sam ran the length of the hall and wrapped Temperance so tightly in his arms that she thought a rib might have cracked.  
'Not your fault.' she wheezed, pushing at him to let go.  
'Dad and Cas told me about what happened.'  
'Well, we got more to add.' Dean said, leading the way to the kitchen.  
Castiel and John were sitting around the table, half a loaf of sliced bread spread with two kinds of peanut-butter were stacked on Castiel's plate.   
'Hell's closed.' she said, without preamble taking a slice of bread and loading it with raspberry jam.   
Castiel nodded solemnly, to Temperance.  
'Well done, Sister.'  
'Thanks bro.' she put on a deliberate American accent for that one.  
'So, whats happening?' Dean asked, pouring coffee grounds into the filter and stacking cups on the table.  
'With god?'  
'No, with the peanut-butter.' he rolled his eyes, sarcastically.  
'I just wish I had been there.' Sam pressed, leaning across the table towards Temperance.   
'It was such fun. Papa Midnite had a little Voodoo dolly of you and Dean got eaten by a Hellhound.'  
'Just a regular Saturday night.' Dean winked.  
'It is Tuesday.' Castiel went as far as to check the calendar on his phone, he looked a little cranky.  
'You need sleep, Cas, without your powers you're basically a baby in a trench coat.' Dean ruffled his hair and set a coffee cup beside him hand.  
Not for the first time, Temperance wondered if they had slept together, she tasted her coffee, made a face and surreptitious spat it back into the cup. Castile had noticed, he looked at her cup, then at his and spat his own drink back out.  
Dean saw that and pushed the sugar bowl towards him.  
'Try it with sugar, Cas.' he urged.  
Temperance chewed her bread slowly, ponderously. The rush of information in her mouth wasn't right, she wasn't eating, she was analayzing.   
'I can taste it.'  
'Uh, good?' Sam looked at the bread and back to her, shaking his head.  
'No, I mean, I can taste all of it, I can taste its mother fucking DNA structure, I can taste the fucking tree that was pulped to made the box is was shipped in.'  
'You can taste every molecule.' Castiel put in, drawing her eyes to him.  
'Shit.' she said, dropping the bread.   
'What, you're gone Angel on us now?' Dean joked, but his eyes looked tight and worried.  
'Looks like.'  
'Doesn't mean you're getting out of cooking dinner, its your turn!' Sam said, trying to lighten the mood.  
She was changing again, she kept changing, nothing seemed able to stop it.

John Winchester was a lot of things, but subtle wasn't one of them. Temperance had seen his sneaking around all hours of the day and night, snatching glances in mirrors, pinching himself.  
'Whats wrong?' She cornered him in the kitchen, he was looking at himself int he back of a spoon.  
He looked like he was about to argue, but he deflated before her eyes and said. 'I dunno, I just, don't feel right. I'm tired and shit and my chest is a little tight. Can you take a look?'  
'Sure.'  
She took a deep breath and reached out into his mind. She didn't go for his memories this time, she tried to focus on his body, on the blood flowing under his skin, on the structure of his bones. He was definitely mortal again, she was happy to see.  
Wait.  
She frowned, checked through him once more.  
That wasn't right, that couldn't be right. She took his arms, holding onto him as she delved through him with her power.  
'You've got cancer.'  
A series of emotions played out over his face, so quickly that the only one she registered was a sort of forced calm.  
'Ok.' he spoke, from a long way away.  
'No, no, not ok. I can't fucking heal it, I'm trying, its just, its like a pit, its eating my power but its not fixing you!' she threw herself at him, or rather, she threw her power at him, desperate to change the mass of confused tissue in his lungs.   
'Kid, just, relax.' he pushed her hands aside. Shook his head and slowly traced his face with his fingertips.   
'John?'  
'Whats causing it?'  
His body was dying. It was rotting away before her, something was killing him.  
'Its, well. Your body is deteriorating. Its as if the magic used on you was sucking the power right out of your cells. You're breaking down, bit by bit.'  
'Can anything stop it.'  
She bit back her only answer, an act of god, maybe. Shaking her head she tried to reach out with her power once more. Nothing happened.  
'I'm sorry.' how stupid did that sound, fuck, but she needed to say something. This couldn't be happening, not after everything they had done.  
'Kid, Tem, just, let me tell the boys, ok?'

'What?' Dean gasped, stumbling towards his dad the following day, when John had gathered them together and told them the news.   
'Its ok Dean, just means I'm heading out, sooner rather than later.'  
'You can't die, not after everything we did.'  
'Dean, you saved me so I could die, so I could live and die and I've done my living. I miss your mother, I want to see her again, I want to rest. I'm ready.'  
'I can't let you die.' Dean was crying openly, Sam curled his his arms around himself, dropping into a seat.  
'You aint letting me, its just my time. I'll get to see Mary. My girl, I miss her so much.'  
'No! Dad, please don't give up, we can fix this.' Sam begged.  
Temperance stifled a sob in her sleeve, thick tears were streaming down her face now. This is what love was supposed to be, this is what family was supposed to be.  
'Ive made some mistakes, but I've always done the best I could. I don't wanna fight anymore. I'm tired. I'm done. I've been running and fighting for so long now and, well, I'm done. I'm ok. Tem says I've got a year or two.'  
'A year.' Dean echoed, dully.   
'Plenty of time to play catch with my boys.' John cuffed them both around the shoulders and pulled them into a hug.  
Temperance turned away, Castiel followed her, she heard his gentle tread on the gravel. She sniffed loudly and tried to tidy her mascara before it left her with panda eyes.   
'Here.' Castiel held out a handkerchief.  
'Thanks.' she croaked. She hadn't had a good cry in a while, she had a lot to cry about.  
'I am sad too.' he looked it, really he did look very sad.  
'You're only human.'   
'Usually you would suggest an alcoholic drink, or something equally unhealthy, to ease our suffering.'  
She plastered on a smile at that and even managed a chuckle. 'There is this great goth club in Prague, its in an abandoned theatre. They have a free cocktail when you pay in after 11pm.'  
'Yes, that sounds wonderful.'  
'We should go.'  
'By goth do you mean the nomadic people of modern Germany?'   
'Was that a joke?'  
'Yes.'  
'Never change, Castiel.' she pressed a kiss to his cheek. 

The brief respite was just that, brief, far too brief.   
A storm tore through the countryside, it tore up the forest and flattened the town. Temperance noted, sadly, that the music shop was gone and the owner was missing. There was a keyboard in here she had been eyeing up.   
'Did that feel a little personal to anyone else?' Sam asked, surveying the wreckage on his laptop. The rest of the county was fine, normal June weather had returned to the USA, normal calm skies prevailed.  
Dean pushed the lid closed, worrying his lips between his teeth. 'So, he knows we aint under Papa Midnite's spell anymore. He knows Hell is shut.'  
'Looks like.' Sam grunted.   
Hanging her head Temperance rubbed her temples, she had no idea how to stop god, none. She had power, she had a fuck ton of power, but this was god she was facing.   
She needed a plan, she needed help.   
Sam had thrown himself into research with gusto and an endless supply of granola bars and caffeine free drinks. Temperance wasn't going to hold out hope that his library would turn up a magic word to kill the creator of the universe they inhabited.   
Dean sensed how despairing of the situation she was, and took to making fun of her, in the hopes to bring out a jolt of inspiration. They were joking together in the music room, he had tried to get her to play some Blue Oyster Cult, but she pointed out that she didn't have a cowbell. So he settled for getting her to teach him a riff on the bass.   
'What does killing Him achieve? I mean, it might just end the world.'  
'It might.' she agreed.  
'Is there any other way?'  
She took up her cello, putting new strings on it and coiling the old ones into a loop.  
'I can't Cage god.' she drummed her fingers on the neck of the cello, then set the instrument aside. She felt Dean, he watched her move from the music rack to the records, then to the drums. She trailed her hand over the objects in her wake, trying to think of a plan.  
There was a bottle of tequila on top of the record player, she spun it in her fingers, throwing it from hand to hand until Dean snagged it out of the air.   
'Ok, so you can't kill Him and you can't Cage Him.' Dean said as he popped the top off the tequila, drank from the bottle. He turned back to the bass, plugged the cord into the battered amp and tested the tune.  
She took the liquor, titled it down her throat and looked at the label. It had a cartoon of a guy wearing a sombrero sitting on a donkey, the alcohol was clear and bitter. She had a vision of John Constantine, playing that bass, drinking even cheaper tequila, and telling her just how clever he was.   
He had once trapped a Demon in an egg cup, he had outwitted all the Prince's of Hell, cured his lung cancer and won a few extra years of life without breaking a sweat. He destroyed the things he came up against so perfectly that they never came back from it. He didn't kill much, he was too much of a cunt for that, he ruined his enemies instead.   
Dean plucked something out on the instrument, the notes fell dully from the strings, then he gave up with a shrug and flicked through her records.   
'Who is this? he held up a sleeve.  
'Bikini Kill.'  
'Sounds awful.' he flung it aside and kept on rummaging.   
'You actively dislike a lot of my music.' she pointed out, watching him search.  
'Not these guys!' he held up U2, looking triumphant. She had forgotten about that one, she took the sleeve while he put on the record. Her dad had bought her this, from a jumble sale when she was 14. She didn't remember taking this with her when she left home and peered into the cardboard, half expecting Cain to jump out.  
'I hate U2.' she said, without heat. You were supposed to hate U2, dads liked U2, uncool old people liked U2.   
'You hate everything!' he complained.  
'I don't hate you.'  
'Wow, stop, I don't think I can handle the praise.' he scoffed, nudging her with his elbow.  
'Hey.' Sam appeared at the door, he shot a quizzical look at the record player.  
'We're taking creative break from planning.' she supplied.  
'Ok, um, I was gonna go on a supply run.'  
'I'll come.' Dean stood up and left with his brother.  
When he was gone Temperance lifted the arm and turned off the music. Memories of Cain were the last thing she needed. She put it back.  
As she organised the stack she let her mind wander. God was a guy, named Chuck, he wasn't afraid of her. He should be. She was coming for him.   
She gathered up crumpled music notes, frowning as she tried to formulate a plan. Temperance knew, in her heart, she couldn't ask Sam and Dean to do this with her. This was not a thing that a human could live through, which meant that she had to go it alone.  
Alone.  
The paper was shoved into the cello case and the instrument was placed on top. She took a screw and began collapsing the drums, sliding them into their covers. She folded up the stool and leaned it against the wall, she unplugged the amp and laid the bass in its soft cover, there was a lump in it, her hands unearthed one of Constantine's journals.  
John Constantine would probably have a hundred thousand ideas about winning a fight against god, he would pour Chuck through a strainer, trap him in a beam of moonlight, feed him to the Swamp Thing in a salad. He was better prepared for this than she was, because he believed in magic, in his own magic, he knew what he could and couldn't do and he could do just about anything he put his mind to.  
In a flash she knew exactly what she had to do, she lifted the book and pressed her lips to the worm leather.  
The room was in a semblance of order, packed up, neat and tidy. She turned off the light and closed the door.

She spent a long time trying to say goodbye, without saying goodbye. Sam noticed, Dean tried not to. She taught Castiel to drive her car and gave him the key, she used up all her eyeliner and didn't buy anymore.  
'Hey, kid, can we talk?' John knocked on her door, glanced at her collection of black shirts that she was currently sorting through. Most of them were ragged.  
'Where are you planning on going exactly?'  
'Stop god.' she put pushed the clothes into two bundles, rags and reuse.   
'Temperance. 'You can't.' he was stern now, like a father, a bit like Dean when he decided to take control.  
'Do not tell me that I can't stop god, I can. If anyone could it would be me.'  
He laughed, a small cruel sound 'You sound pretty sure of yourself, kid.'  
She stood, squaring her shoulders. She let the veil drop, she put down the human pretense and looked at him, from a very long way away.   
'John Winchester, do not patronize me.' she quickly pulled herself back together, holding out just long enough so that he looked a little afraid. He toed the bundle of clothing, unwilling to look at her.  
'I've died, I've lived. I know what I'm doing.'  
'I don't doubt that. But you're hurting my boys, you're killing Dean. I saw him broken before and I can see him breaking again.' His tone was gruff.  
'Well who's fault was that?' she flicked razor sharp eyes over him. 'He's my friend and I love him, I went to Hell for him and I'll tear apart his creator, for him. I'm angry at that shit-head, yeah, but if it was just me in this that is all it would be. Anger. He threatens everything I care about, he threatens my family, my world, my fucking music scene. I'll destroy him for that.'  
'How?' he sounded genuinely curious, and sat down on her bed with a careful movement.   
She sighed, blowing out a long breath before resuming her sorting. 'I need to get him somewhere where he has not control. I need to take his power. I've and idea about it, or, well, Constantine had an idea about it and it got me thinking.'  
'Whats that?'  
'Do you know anything about Quantum Physics?'  
'No, kid, I really don't'.' his tone had taken a turn from curious to worried. Temperance had to admit, it was a bit of a stretch to forgo the supernatural for science.   
'Me neither but Constantine knew a bit, he was good at making connections, at seeing to the heart of things.'   
'You're gonna Quantum Physics God to death?' he had found a book on black holes beside her bed, she had gone into town to borrow it from the local library, and he picked this up, looking more bemused by the second.   
'Not exactly.' she tapped her fingers together, when she had her thoughts in order she said, trying not to sound like a nut-job.   
'You know that there are laws in the universe, the supernatural nonsense we deal with breaks almost all of them, but the Earth itself exists on a plane that subscribes to shit like gravity and thermodynamics.'  
'If you say so, I took shop in high school.'  
'I never even finished school, so, this is the blind leading the blind, trust me. Well, those laws, god made them, he made them to keep everything in check because he wasn't always going to be here. He was going to be shooting around his other worlds or hanging out in the in between. Its like one big computer, or lots of little computers all joined up.'  
'Ok, so, how does that help you?' he threw the book aside with a sigh.  
She pointed to it. 'Black holes, you know they like, eat everything around them yeah?'  
'Yeah, I guess.'  
'Well there is a theory that in that chaos is where the universe makes actual sense. Scientists reckon that black holes don't just suck matter in, they fix things. They consciously try to reorder the universe, to make it work better.'  
He frowned at her, glanced at the rolling tin and grinder on the floor, then back at her again, one brow raised.  
'Actual science, not stoner logic!' she there a copy of Quantum, a science periodical, at his head, but he caught it before it hit.   
'I think you're talking to the wrong Winchester about this.'  
'You asked.' she shrugged, rising to her feet.  
'So, you're gonna put God in a black hole?'   
She cocked her head to the side, maybe that would work. 'No, I'm going to beat him at his own game. Play by his rules.'  
'His rules of Quantum Physics?' he mocked, snorting a little.  
'Power isn't real, its all about perception. You see this?' she let her eyes flash between darkness and light, ignoring his mirth.   
'Yeah?'  
'Why can I do it?'  
'Well, uh, your dad was an Angel and your mom was a Demon. It's genetic?' he shrugged, crossing his arms.  
'Nope, genes have nothing to do with it. They were wearing human flesh to make me, that human flesh transferred DNA. It's not genetics. It's about desire, it's about knowing who you are. Nature and nurture. I was raised as the child of an Angel and a Demon. I act like the man who raised me even though we share nothing in common, no blood, no biology, barely any likes and dislikes. I am his daughter because I am his daughter. Get it?'  
'Not even a little.' his mouth softening into a smile.   
'Its to do with belief.'  
'You believe a thing enough that it comes true?'  
'Sort of, you have enough faith in what ever it is you need to have faith in then you can work with it. Magic, for instance, I was never great shakes at it, because I had nothing to believe in, but now its different. Now I believe in me.'  
'Well, that sounds like a great Ted Talk, hon, but it wont kill God and I don't see what it has to do with wacky space science.'  
She shrugged, maybe she wasn't explaining it right, it didn't matter. She knew what she meant, she believed.   
'Sam and Dean are trying to help, they're real worried about you.' John pressed. He looked old, his skin was starting to sag and his hair had finally begun to silver.  
'They are both amazing, you know that? They're miracles of men.' she let herself smile properly at him, she let herself fell happy. The man was dying for fucks-sake, almost before her eyes.  
'You're not gonna stay and make me a few grand-babies are ya?'  
'No' she crossed to the door and gestured for him to walk with her.  
'What about, just babies?' he winked, throwing his eyes up and down her body. Even half dead he did the bedroom eyes well.   
She laughed, loudly, and smacked him in the gut 'Oh sweet merciful fuck thats where he gets it from!'  
'What?' Dean poked his head out of his room at the sound, the warmth of her smile making him laugh a little.  
'What happened?'  
'He is really your dad, is all.' she explained.  
John clapped a hand on her back, shrugging. 'Can't blame a guy for trying!'

He had a year to live, a year she wanted his sons to spend with him, happy and untroubled. Should she leave them now, or later. Did they need her around for this.  
No, they needed each other and they had each other. She had to end this, now.   
John sat with his children, chatting, living, they looked blessedly normal.  
Temperance shook her head and walked, still smiling, down to the kitchen. Behind a dusty can of oatmeal, that Sam had forgotten about, was a nice bottle of whiskey.   
Teelings single malt, brewed in Dublin near St. Pats cathedral and transported by magic across the great waste of the atlantic ocean into her hands. She had never spent much time in Dublin, she had once entertained the vague notion of going to college there, but she had liked the city. She had liked the bars and venues, she had liked the ladies running market stalls and the vicious seagulls that gathered on the river.   
The distillery had opened in a square that was full of factories, markets and artists studios, which had now been replaced with apartments and hotels and cafes. She opened the cap, rubbed her thumb on the thick paper label, and took in the stinging smell.  
it tasted as good as she remembered and she drank it straight from the bottle. She wanted to be outside, even if the view was somewhat lacking, the sun was golden bright in the sky, and the air was warm.She sat on the weedy grass by the door, watching the earth move.   
It was peaceful, it was nice, with the door open she could hear the boys and their father chatting, walking around, living.   
Dean was showing Castiel how to fry an egg, Sam was reading up on cannabis oil for palliative care and John was looking at his children. She closed her eyes, listening to them below.  
The whiskey was sweet and hot on her tongue, when the bottle was empty she tottered down the stairs and washed and dressed in her few remaining clothes. Her jeans, a tatty net vest and the leather jacket Crowley had made for her.  
It was her 36th birthday, it was midsummer, the longest day of the year. The sun would be up long after she was gone.  
She had to do this.  
She was scared.  
She was so fucking scared.

Sam would understand, he wouldn't like it, but he would understand. Dean wouldn't want to.  
'Guys?'  
Sam and Dean looked at her, clean from the shower and she held out a hand, until they followed.  
She saw Dean pale as he took in the bare room, the posters and pictures were down, the chest of drawers was empty.   
'I have a plan, and it will work.'  
'Ok, what do we do?' Dean was staring at her, intently, as if the force of his gaze could keep her there, and it could. So she closed her own and looked away.   
'Tem?' Sam asked.  
'I need you to watch over me while I do this. Watch over my body.'  
'You're doing this alone?' Deans hand latched onto her wrist, she could feel his short nails pressing into her skin. Gently, carefully and very slowly, she pried his fingers away and pressed a kiss to his palm.   
She dropped a book, Constantine's journal into Sam's hand, his lighter tucked under the cover. 'I'm not going to fail. I'm not.'  
'Tem.' she turned to Dean, he looked so sad. Devastatingly so.   
'Thank you, for everything. Thank you and I love you and, just, you're the only family I've ever wanted.'  
Dean bowed his head and she slipped her pendant around his neck, resting a hand on the stone. She expected his kiss, it was flavoured by his tears, but it wasn't demanding, it was beautiful.  
'You are family.' He said, a tear running down the side of his nose, as he pulled back.  
'You're a Winchester.' Sam said.  
'I hate goodbyes, I'm more of a leave before the lights go on person.'  
'You're not gonna come back, are you, even if you win?' Sam was holding the journal to his chest, it almost disappeared beneath his big hands.   
'Why not? Why the hell not?' Dean growled, there were still tears in his eyes, but his mouth was a thin angry line.  
'Because it would be too difficult. It would hurt us all too much.' Sam answered looking at the book.  
She nodded, there was no coming back from this change, not really.  
The African Dream Root was fresh from Kew Gardens, she took the pod in her hands and lay down on the bed. She had cleaned the room to a shine, it was empty, like a spare bed in a hotel.  
'I love you both.'  
Sam looked at his brother, raising a brow to say that it was now or never. He touched her shoulder, bent down and kissed her cheek, gently.   
'Tem. Please don't do this.' Dean's voice was small.  
She looked up at him, waiting. She was always so easily tempted, she revelled in vice, but not now, not today. She gathered her painful resolve. No point in moping about.   
'Hey, want to hear a joke?'  
'No' Dean's voice broke on the word.  
'How do you know that an elephant has been in the fridge?'  
'That ain't a joke.' he protested.  
'Dean' she kicked him, lightly in the ribs as he sat on the bed.  
'Fine, I don't know. How do you tell?' his hand was wrapped around her emerald. His pule bouncing in his throat from the strain of holding back his sobs. He was handsome, even now, especially now.  
'Footprints' she closed her eyes. 'In the butter.'


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ....'I'm ready'  
> 'You sure?'  
> 'Yeah, honey. Its been a long time living.' he bent down and kissed her on the cheek, gently.....
> 
> I do not own and am not affiliated with Supernatural or Hellblazer.
> 
> Chapters bounces between a few different POV - its still in draft form.

Dreams have rules, not obvious ones, but stricter ones than the waking world. In her dream she decided that it wasn't a dream, just happing in one. So around her things lost their dream-like quality and settled into a type of reality. A soft blur where she wasn't focused on and a hyper-reality where she needed it. A real dream.  
A form settled around her. She looked down, her old leather jacket, her crumpled minidress, battered docs. She knew that she would have sticky hair before she touched it, knew that her sunglasses would be tangled on top of her head. This is how she was, before god intervened, this is what she looked like when she fell into the Winchesters lives. Her skin was scar pocked and greasy, her nails looked brittle. 

'We need to talk about a few things.' she said and suddenly, not quite looking like he belonged there, god appeared before her.   
Chuck scowled, stiffened, then looked around. 'How did you do that?'  
'What?'  
'Call me here? Summon me?”  
She looked around their setting, there was a smell in the air of thunder and ozone.   
It looked a little bit like a cafe she once worked in, in New Orleans 'The Rising Sun', but it was colder and much cleaner. The old wicker fans overhead were still, the brass edged bar gleamed without a hint of rust or smudged fingerprints and the floor was smooth and shining with varnish. It had never looked like this when she worked there.   
'How do you think I did it?' she asked him, tapping the bar. It felt solid under her finger.  
Chuck's hands flexed, as if testing the air around him, but he stayed silent.  
'You tired to kill me.' she pointed out.  
'You're still alive.' he snarled.  
She decided not to argue about that, this was already going to be strange enough.   
'E io etterno duro*. You tired to paint me out, you sent me away.' she chided.  
'Well, yeah!' he crossed his arms, defensively.   
'That was cruel.'  
'You coulda just stayed there! I was giving you a happy ending!' his voice dropped an octave, he growled at her from across the dream room, his eyes flashing dangerously.   
'You were trying to get me out of the way.' Temperance wasn't sure if he could really hear her, maybe he just wasn't listening. That was the problem of staging this in a dream, it was as real as she wanted it to be, but it was still a dream.  
His eyes flittered about the room, never resting in one place for long as he set about testing her defences, looking for the exits. She smiled, at the absurdity of it all. She had god in her head, the real McCoy, and he couldn't get out.  
'You just had to be difficult' he pouted, touching a table with a careful hand. She wanted to know what he could see around him, what did this place look like to his eyes.  
'Thats me, I'm difficult.' she said, cheerfully.   
'This is my story, not yours, it ends when I say so and how I say so!.'  
'You are such a fucking looney. Have you figured it out yet?' she leaned back against the bar, arms spread.   
'What?” he snarled, lightning crackling from his clenched fists.  
'How to get out of my head, you know that you're in my world? You're in my dream.'   
The walls around them shifted, windows closing over as quickly as a brush might paint them out. In the gloom, they both seemed to glow.  
'My rules, little god.' she called.  
'So this is how you wanna play it? You wanna lock me in a cage? You twisted bitch! I was good to you, I gave you power, I gave you strength, I gave you a good story!'  
'Fuck off you did not!' she rolled her eyes at him, his edges shimmering as he tried desperately to disappear. It was interesting to seem him lie to himself, like all good writers do. He really did think that he had something to do with how she turned out.  
Lots of other people had plenty to do with who she was, good and bad. Cain, Abbadon, John fucking Constantine. She had learned what family was from Dean, she had learned how to live and die and live again by watching it happen to everyone around her.  
Chuck stood, breathing heavily for a moment. He was so used to wearing skin he seemed to forget how much more he was without it. That knowledge was something that had come slowly to her, learning not to be bound by flesh. It started years ago when she stopped outwardly ageing, and now, well, now she knew who she was, and she wan't her body.   
'I am what I am and you had nothing to do with it. I am who I am because of other people, because of me.' she said.  
'Whats your angle? What do you want? You want me to make the brothers grim and grimmer happy and healthy and live the American dream? You want your Demon boy back? What?' he snapped.  
'All that sounds lovely' she agreed, fingering her frayed cuff.   
This jacket had fallen to pieces years ago, it only existed in this dream, and this minidress had been hopelessly stained by blood the last time she had worn it in the flesh, but here it felt soft and new.  
'It's all there, I can make it all happen.' he moved forward, pushing aside a chair, which fell to the floor with a clatter, and burst apart into dust.   
'Just what a good person would want, if they were asked.' she continued, looking up. God was unsure now, but rallied, admirably.  
'I can make a deal with you. Thats all you want, fine, I'll do it, but you gotta die. You gotta get out of my creation.' he scoffed, throwing out a hand.   
It was a commanding hand, he moved it like he expected something to happen. Lucifer was in the habit of that, he would make as if to click his fingers when he wanted to do something. It seemed he learned that from his daddy.  
'I never said I was a good person, fuck, I never claimed to be a person!' she rolled her shoulders back, her voice light.   
It was time, she told herself, stop playing with your food Temperance. Chuck's face fell, he looked a this hand as if it had betrayed him.  
'I am completely out of your grand plan. You didn't write any stories for me and you can't write any now.' Temperance tapped her foot on the floor, it felt like a floor, if she really thought about it.  
She patted down her pockets and pulled out a roll of battered mints, she had offered the real version of these mints to Dean and Sam years and years ago. She had been high, she had been depressed, she had been ready to die. Not anymore. Discarding these she looked at god, not her god, just a guy with a little bit of power. He looked very small to her, now.   
You can mess with the people around me, and yeah, that will affect me, but I am completely my own. You can't touch me.'  
He smirked, full of false bravado. 'Thats what you think, huh?'  
'Thats the truth. You tried to get me into your big picture by jamming with me, in that bar, but it didn't take. I understand that now. I didn't have a heart to understand it then.' she folded her hands together, there were fading club stamps on her wrist, peeling nail polish glittered under her dream lights.   
'So. What are you gonna do about it? You going to run around and free mankind?' his eyes flashed, something in his face shifted, like melting wax. He started to look less like a human and more like a rubber suit. His features blurring and fading, the angles and bones smoothing out.   
She snorted, it was absurd. The whole damn premise for existence was absurd. She shook her head.  
'No,I wont. Haven't you been listening? I see your stories, I see what you are, I get it. You're afraid of me. You have no power over me.'  
'If you're expecting me to go all David Bowie in the Labrynth' he began, but she cut him off snapping her fingers and shutting his mouth. His eyes bulged in his head at that.  
'When I was in one of those other worlds, I killed myself, I let myself be killed.' she touched her side, remembering that painful death with a sudden flip of her gut. The apocalypse world had been a trying time, she had been grieving without a heart, drunk, and Amara had been riding around in the back of her head.  
'I was so fucking happy to be dead, then I woke up, still dead. I was outside, I was in your play box, but everyone else was still dead. In the nothing, where there isn't even any dark, I opened my eyes and I saw.' there were no words to explain that, but he knew what she had seen, what she had experienced.  
He stiffened slightly at that.. She watched him glance sharply around, as if expecting attack and she knew that she had him. Chuck, god, the father, the almighty, creator of heaven and earth and all that is seen and un-fucking-seen. He was nothing.  
'Ever read Frank Herbert?' she asked, lightly.   
He tried to vanish, tired to shimmer out of existence but he couldn't, not when she was looking at him, this was her world.  
'Thought as much.' she sighed, giving him his mouth back.  
'I can still kill you, I can cause you a world of pain.' His voice shrill.  
'So?'   
'I can start the apocalypse!'  
She chuckled, sat down at the gleaming piano. He had tried to do this to her, with a piano.  
'I'm dancing in my underpants' she began, while he hurried around the room, trying to get out.   
'I'm gunna run for government, I'm gunna start a covers band and all...'   
'Stop!' he demanded.   
She played on, watching him twitch, feeling the power spreading our around her.  
'What do you want?' a vein throbbed at his temple, he looked furious, afraid, he looked human.  
She kept playing, laughing as she sang the tune. 'By the time reality hits, the chimes of freedom fell to bits..'  
He snarled and launched himself at her, his fist collided with her temple, and she did fall back, but she kept laughing. She laughed as he punched and pummelled and when he stopped, when he realised he hadn't made a mark on her, he backed away pale and trembling. His rapidly diminishing face sagging with the effort of being real.  
'You're getting slow in your old age mister, didn't I tell you this was my dream?'  
'Amara made you. My sister.' he grunted, his mouth wouldn't cooperate.  
'Nope, wrong again Ringmaster.' she closed the lid on the piano and spun on the stool, facing him. Something was flowing inside her now, where there should be blood and air, there was something all the richer. '  
He shook his head, falling into a seat, slumping against a wrought iron table. 'You don't have to do this.'  
'I don't have to do anything that I don't want to, or be anything I don't want to be' she smiled, it made him shiver.   
He hadn't been afraid in so long and it seemed that he wasn't sure how to be afraid anymore. She almost pitied him, almost. Too fresh in her mind was all the fucking shit the Winchester's went through, Dean who had crawled out of his own grave, Sam who had been tortured by Lucifer's blood. Her own dad, Cain, had been a pawn for all eternity. John Constantine had been cursed to play the hero and the fool. Everyone, everything, it was all a joke to god, it was all cheap TV, shoddy daytime entertainment.   
'You can't kill me, you can kill my creations but you can't kill me.' he garbled, his tongue too thick, his mouth too heavy.  
'I can make you hurt. I'd like that, but I'm not you, I am so much more interesting. So here is the deal, god, you hand this universe over, you leave and don't dare come back. This place is mine.' She stalked towards him, pushed him up so that his head was facing her, in his awkward seat.   
He tired to speak, his eyes were putrefying in his head. She wiped her hand on her jeans and hoped he could hear her.   
'You don't belong in my world and it is mine already, can't you feel it?'  
As she said this, after the manner of dreams, it came to pass. She knew what she said was true, because it was true in her dream and her dream made it true. It was all hers now.   
Some magic can't be faked, somethings can't be learned. You know a thing and that thing is. You give a thing a name and you give it life. She took the world form his hands and held it in her own.   
She could feel it in her finger tips, the fabric of reality, which wasn't real at all. She could reach out and shatter the souls of everyone and everything that had ever lived, if she wanted. It was a rush and god cowered before her.   
'Get out' she said and her voice, she realised, wasn't her voice. She wasn't hearing it, she wasn't really seeing or feeling any of this.   
'Get out!'  
The roar was wind between the universes, it whipped around them, the cafe was gone. There was nothing but that nothing was everything and it pulled god down. He sank below, into a strange unknowable stew of what was and what is and what can be.   
He was screaming, he was fighting, it was like a fly buzzing around her head. She batted it away and he was gone. Something inside her lurched and she had feet again and they hit the ground.   
Swinging up and over the side of her bed, where Sam and Dean were watching, frozen in that moment, she got up. She pressed a kiss to Dean's cheek, to Sam's forehead. Then she moved out of time, through time, there was so much to do and she had so much of it, of time.   
She was time.

It was nice outside of things, but even with god gone, there was work to be done. It was terribly was strange, she felt everything, every life, every bit of energy, the never born and the long dead, she could feel souls thriving and growing around her.   
Reluctantly, she pulled away from the raw power that fuelled her universe. She knew that she had to wrap up a few loose ends. With something like a thought she called someone to her. There was a settling of existence nearby, a flash that wasn't quite a flash,  
Lucifer wasn't wearing the body she knew, he seemed to be made of light, fantastic light, shot through with colour she hadn't seen before.   
'Kid, you got a lot of nerve.' he began, but he quickly silenced himself.  
'Hi.'  
'Dad?'  
'No, just me. I, eh, got rid of him.'  
'Shit, you're, wow. Hon, how did you manage that?'  
She wanted to shrug, but she didn't have shoulders, or hands. If she had a body then this might be less awkward. She had an urge to fidget, it tickled in the back of her being, she wanted to make, to create, she wanted to build something. It was an urge she had never had before.  
'I'm still not too sure. I think he wrote himself into a corner, in the end.' it was just her and the, one time, Devil himself in that endless expanses of possibility.  
'I gotta say, I'm sorta proud.'  
They walked through nothingness, it took an age, or no time at all, depending how you looked at it. Suddenly she felt flesh gathering around her, legs with feet to hold them, she parted the veil, pushing into nothing, onto a small Greek Island.  
Sound rushed in with the water, the sea lapped gently at the pale and sandy shore and in the air beyond them gulls were crying.   
She was dressed as she had been, before it all, it felt incredibly strange to know her body wasn't real.  
'So, you're God. Thats a big change.' he spoke, conversationally, picking up a stone and skimming it across a small wave.  
Temperance sighed. 'Is this how God's are made then, is this what happens, you go through enough shit that you become a new power?'  
'Did you think to ask Him, before you bested Him?'  
'Nope, he's a cunt, couldn't give a fuck what he had to say. If I'm honest.'  
'Jeez, I guess I'm a little redundant now.'  
Lucifer sat on a drift wood bench overlooking the sea, looking forlorn. He crossed his long legs at the ankle and closed his eyes, tilting his face towards the sun.   
'Sorry.' she said, meaning, sorry you have no reason to exist, sorry for Caging you, sorry for it all. She sat beside him, her black toed boots skimming the white sand.   
'You got some sort of a plan?' he asked  
'Beyond the whole 'un-fuck the world' thing, no'. She lifted her face to the breeze, feeling more calm than she had in years. The tide began to turn, pushing back out to sea, she watched birds land on the shore and peck at creatures she should probably learn the names of.   
'Can you feel it?' she asked, as the sun began to go down.  
'The change? Yeah, I can honey. It's, its something new.'  
'What do you think, about me being in charge?'   
'I think you have the power to get it done, the will, the know how, all that. There really ain't another like you. I've said it before and I stand by it.'  
'The thing is, I still cant shake the worry that this was his plan anyway.'  
'Naw, you put paid to him' he winked.  
'Free will. More difficult than it sounds.' she said, mulling over the grains of sand that clung to her jeans.  
'You can step in anytime and fix it up.' he spoke kindly, which seemed massively out of character. He put an arm around her, pulled her close.   
'I don't want to live forever. I never wanted to live to begin with.' if anyone could understand that, she thought it might be him. She wasn't good at being alone.   
Lucifer stood, the moonlight bleached all the colour from his clothes, made his hair glow silver, he looked down at her, smiling.   
'I'm ready'   
'You sure?'  
'Yeah, honey. Its been a long time living.' he bent down and kissed her on the cheek, gently.  
She clicked her fingers, his body dispersed, like the fine sand on the dunes, caught in a breeze. Gone. She wondered where to. It all had to do with what the dead thought that they deserved, she didn't much care, the result would be the same. You carry your own Hell, your own Heaven, with you, after all. She had learned that the hard way.   
There were things she wanted to do, things that had to be done, soon enough. Many could wait, and all of them would. She opened a door between the world and went to see Constantine.

She felt dew dampening the legs of her jeans and walked, purposely towards him. He paused, looked up, the world seemed to change. He looked like he did when he died, hopeful, happy, eyes on her. Heaven held no pain for her now, she noticed, though it was like walking through a theatre, she could see behind the screen.  
'At the end of all things?' she stood beside him.  
'Course, love' he folded her to his chest' smiling, his fingers stroking her dark hair.   
'Missed you.'  
'Yeah, missed you too.' she looked up, he was smiling, kindly, his handsome eyes untroubled.  
John Constantine felt like she remembered, his kiss was the same, his voice, his smell. 'Alright?' he asked, looping an arm over her shoulder.  
'Did you hear?'  
'Yep. Who'd 'ave thought it. My Tempy a God?' he sounded quite pleased about it.  
'Have you thought about being reborn?'  
'Me? Nah, not just yet, love. Reckon I'm better off out of the Earth for a while. I was holding on here for you, to die like. Looks like that wont be happening anytime soon, mind you.' He tilted her chin back, surveying her.   
She shook her head, that was a terrible truth. 'Never ever. By the looks of things.'  
He knew how much that hurt her and linked their fingers together in his lap, pressing another kiss to her temple.   
'If I get reincarnated, do I get to remember?' he murmured to her hair.  
'No, not until you die again.' she touched his cheek, his brow, traced his strong jaw. Everyone got to remember their past selves, when they died. No one got to keep it when they were human.  
'Don't press pause on your life, your lives, for me.'  
'I love you. Me, Johnny boy, I love you as I am. I don't want that to be a memory, even if it's a bloody good one.' He kissed her palm, tracing the lines like a bad psychic, as if to divine her future.   
'I can give you life, of a sort, outside of being human. But you wont be you anymore, just like I am not me anymore.' she looked away, couldn't bare to see his face when she said it.  
There was a pregnant pause, she knew him, he knew her. It hurt too much, but they would bare it.  
'It's gunna be hard on you.' his voice gruff.  
'Yeah, I suppose it will.'  
He crushed her to his chest. 'I love you so much. I'm sorry I wasn't there, I am sorry we didn't get a chance.'  
'Me too.'  
'Do you think I'll be better, in the next life?” he rubbed his nose over her cheek, his eyes closed.  
'Maybe.' She kissed him once more, tasted the ghostly tears of the dead on his skin.   
'Tempy.' he sighed.  
'I'll be fine, go live, you're only human after all.' they broke apart, hands trailing as they moved away from each other.  
'You're the best thing that can ever have happened to me' he meant it, she knew that.   
He also knew the memory would not be the same as the fact, he would forever more view their love through the lens of it happening to someone else. In a way, she would be dead, properly dead.   
'It will always live on in me. Its a part of me, sort of a part of creation itself, now.' she turned away and walked down the hill, at the bottom she stopped and took a deep breath.   
If she looked it would be over, if she looked she would beg him to stay and he would and the would hate each other for it.   
She heard the music throb down from his record player. 'Sweet lovely death,' it sang ' I am waiting for your breath, come sweet death, one last caress'.   
She smiled and stepped away, between things, behind things, leaving the soul alone in its heaven.   
'One last caress, sweet death.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * I eternal last/ I am eternal -Dante's Inferno
> 
> And thats a wrap. First draft done, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. Comments are very welcome.


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